Writing Kubernetes-Native Applications

Abstract

In the last chapter, we learned about the development process on and with Kubernetes and discussed the pros and cons of the different approaches. We started out with development approaches where the developer ignored the fact that the application is developed for Kubernetes and moved toward approaches where they are fully aware of the final deployment and target environment Kubernetes. Now let us move on to the final fourth step “All-in on K8s” of our journey to Kubernetes-native development that we introduced in Chapter 3. While in the first three steps of the journey our developers moved between the two extremes of ignoring or being fully aware of Kubernetes, the same thing can be applied to the application itself. On one hand, we could write applications that do not know anything about the fact that they are running on Kubernetes. On the other hand, we could write applications that can access Kubernetes via its API to retrieve information about its environment, react to changes in the environment, or even manipulate resources in Kubernetes. The two models induce a trade-off between complete independence from Kubernetes and fully leveraging Kubernetes services.