Artisanally hand-crafting our own container hosting solutions can be a fun learning experience, but for repeatable production use, let’s look at how to deploy and manage Kubernetes in a reproducible fashion.

Using Terraform, Helm, Draft, Brigade, Duffle, and more, we can deploy and update our Kubernetes clusters (AKS in my case; your mileage may vary!) and applications via a trusted, versioned, consistent process. The Kubernetes ecosystem is a complex space with a baffling array of options; we’ll look at a subset with an eye to repeatable “day two” operations.

With the practical application of open specifications like Cloud Native Application Bundles and open source tools to simplify cluster management and application development, we can more effectively use Kubernetes at scale.