Deploy apps Fast with Google Kubernetes (GKE) UI

As a tech leader and developer, I like to focus my effort in writing code or invest my efforts in architecting web software.

I like to move fast from code to deploy, especially in the development process, and using great ui solution, such as Google's Cloud Kubernetes Engine is very useful for me, as I can avoid getting deep diving into DevOps orchestration.

In this article I'll go thru on how to deploy a node containerized application to Google's Kubernetes Cluster using only the GKE UI.

First we will need to create a GKE Cluster. Just login to google's cloud console and from the menu head to Kubernetes Engine -> Clusters.

Before we can actually create the cluster, we'll need to wait for the Kubernetes Engine Api beeing enabled.

Creating a Kubernetes Cluster

Now we can hit the

Create cluster

We'll go with the default Standard Cluster.

Select the Zone nearest to you and the Master version (higher the better), leave the rest with the default settings and hit the

Create

Google will now create the cluster for us. Meanwhile we can dockerize our node application.

Node.Js Express App

This is our simple express app that will display the request headers and the hostname in JSON:

And this is Dockerfile we will use:

To buid the image we will run docker build command with the your dockerhub repo:

$ docker build -t alonronin/node-env .

And push it to dockerhub's using the docker push command:

$ docker push alonronin/node-env

Creating a Deployment

Now we can deploy it to our newly created cluster. To do that we will hit the

Deploy

In the Container section let's choose existing image and enter our dockerhub's image and hit the

Done

Continue

In the application name field we will enter our app name, node-env, scroll down to the

Deploy

GKE will generate everything for us, it will create the

Deployment

3

1 - 5

Creating a Service

Next we will need to create a service for the

Deployment

button

The services will be exposed at port

80

3000

Let's select Node Port as the service type and click the

Expose

Now that we have a

Service

Ingress

Creating an Ingress

Just select the service and click the

Create Ingress

In the Host and path rules select our

Service

In the Frontend configuration we will need to select the type of traffic from the web, let's select

HTTPS

We can create an SSL certificate by clicking

Create a new certificate

Let's choose

Create Google-managed

Create

The google platform will create our

Ingress

Cluster

Ingress

Service

Deployment

When the Ingress is ready it will issue an IP address. We can create an

A

Check the certificate status

Clicking on our Ingress and then on the Load Balancer Link, we can check out if our certificate is

Active

Provisioning

This can take up until an hour, according to google's docs, so be patient.

It's alive!

Going to the domain we configured we can see everything is just fine and our express app is working as expected.

Conclusion

So we managed to create a Kubernetes cluster, ready for production, only by using the GKE UI.

We accomplished to:

• Create docker image for our application and push it to Dockerhub's repo.
• Create a Kubernets Cluster
• Create a Deployment
• Create a Service
• Create an Ingress
• Create an auto managed SSL Certificate

All of these actions can be done using the kubectl command line tool, by applying yaml files configurations or creating a Helm chart.

If you have any question, suggestion or you find a mistake I've made, feel free to comment on it.