A microservices architecture makes software easier to build and deploy with high availability using decoupled teams. The trade-off for this is increased complexity for deployment, operations and a high potential for duplication of labor.

One way to control these trade-offs is to build domain specific services on top of a common platform.

Kubernetes is a container orchestration system open sourced by Google and incubated by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. Far from simply moving and monitoring jailed processes, Kubernetes adds higher level abstractions that make the introduction of platform type behaviors easier while maintaining the microservices goals of high availability and team independence.

We will review Kubernetes’ primitives and walk through the implementation of some common microservices patterns on top of them, including rolling deployments, stateful services and adding behaviors via sidecars.