Overview
Building a Platform as a Service with Kubernetes.
Kubernetes has been described as many things, one of which is a Platform for building Platforms. By itself, Kubernetes is a powerful orchestration engine for containers, but when combined with an ecosystem of harmoniously integrated tools, it can be used to offer a complete Platform as a Service (PaaS).
A Platform as a Service in this context allows Developers to spend more time on the business logic and less time on the infrastructure. After all, the goal for most companies is to build or provide a product to their internal or external clients, not to manage infrastructure.
Definitions
The industry is full of buzzwords and acronyms, and varying definitions of the same terms.
To better understand the content of this guide, let’s clarify some important terms that will be used throughout.
- Kubernetes: Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration system that automates application deployment, scaling, and management. It serves as the underlying engine for the prescribed PaaS.
- Kubernetes Runtime: A Kubernetes Runtime is a set of tools used to build and manage multiple Kubernetes clusters. It provides the necessary infrastructure to create, manage, and run Kubernetes clusters on a particular computing platform.
- Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS): A Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) is a cloud computing model that offers a platform to customers for developing, running, and managing applications without the complexity of building and maintaining the infrastructure typically required to launch an app. A PaaS abstracts away the complexities of managing Kubernetes clusters and provides users with an easy-to-use interface to deploy their applications.
Journey
It all starts with a plan.
No matter what the sales brochures tell you, building an enterprise Kubernetes platform is no easy feat. It requires a lot of planning and preparation before the first line of code is written.
The below links walk through some opinionated categories that should be considered when building your own PaaS.
Once your PaaS is up and running, it’s time to verify you’re cluster is production-ready and start start building and shipping your applications.