Containers in the Cloud Flashcards
(18 cards)
What is a container?
An invisible box around your code and its dependencies, with limited access to its own partition of the file system and hardware. It’s highly portable, allowing ‘code once, run anywhere’.
What are two key benefits of using containers?
Portability (run code from development to production without changing anything) and Scalability (can be duplicated quickly to meet demand).
What is Kubernetes?
An open-source platform for managing containerized workloads and services.
What are the main functions of Kubernetes?
Orchestrates many containers on many hosts, scales them as microservices, and facilitates rollouts and rollbacks.
What is a Kubernetes Cluster?
At the highest level, it’s a set of APIs to deploy containers on a set of nodes called a cluster.
What is the Control Plane in Kubernetes?
The system is divided into a set of primary components that run as the control plane and a set of nodes that run containers.
What is a Node in Kubernetes?
In Kubernetes, a node represents a computing instance, like a machine.
What is a Pod in Kubernetes?
The smallest unit in Kubernetes that you create or deploy. It’s a wrapper around one or more containers that run together and share networking/storage resources.
Why do Pods have fixed IPs within a Service?
Pod IP addresses don’t remain stable over time as they are created and destroyed. A Service provides a stable endpoint (fixed IP) for a group of Pods.
What is a Deployment in Kubernetes?
A group of replicas of the same Pod that keeps your Pods running even when the nodes they run on fail.
What is a Service in Kubernetes?
An abstraction which defines a logical set of Pods and a policy by which to access them.
How can external traffic access Pods in a Kubernetes cluster?
Through a Service with a fixed IP, which can be exposed externally via a load balancer. In GKE, the load balancer is created as a network load balancer.
What is a rolling update in Kubernetes?
A method to update applications by creating new Pods individually and waiting for new Pods to be available before destroying old ones, ensuring continuous availability.
What is Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)?
A Google-hosted managed Kubernetes service in the cloud.
How does GKE simplify Kubernetes management compared to self-hosting?
GKE manages all the control plane components for us and is responsible for provisioning and managing all the control plane infrastructure behind it.
What is the key difference between GKE Autopilot mode and Standard mode?
Autopilot manages underlying infrastructure (node configuration, autoscaling, auto-upgrades, baseline security) for you. Standard mode requires you to manage the underlying infrastructure yourself.
Which GKE mode is generally recommended for most users and production?
Autopilot mode, as it’s optimized for production and promotes operational efficiency.
Name three benefits of running GKE clusters.
Google Cloud’s load-balancing for Compute Engine instances, Automatic scaling of your cluster’s node instance count, Automatic upgrades for your cluster’s node software, Node auto-repair to maintain node health and availability, Logging and monitoring with Google Cloud Observability, Node pools to designate subsets of nodes within a cluster.
