In my previous blog post I showed how to use the Kops tool to create a production ready Kubernetes cluster on Amazon Web Services (AWS). In this follow-up post I will show how to install Elasticsearch and its graphical counterpart Kibana in the cluster, in order to be able to collect and store logs from your cluster and search/read them. We will also install Fluentd as this component is responsible for transmitting the standard Kubernetes logs to Elasticsearch.

Today I will be talking about Kops, which is an official tool for creating Kubernetes clusters on AWS, with support for GCE and VMware vSphere in alpha. It takes a whole lot of the pain out of setting up a Kubernetes cluster yourself, but still presents many challenges to overcome and a great degree of freedom in how you configure the cluster. I have recently created a Kubernetes cluster on AWS for a client, where I used the Kops tool for the very first time and I will here present what I learnt about implementing best practices with this technology stack.

Earlier, I wrote about zero downtime docker deployment with Tutum. I have recently started experimenting with Amazon ECS (EC2 Container Service), which is Amazon’s offering for the orchestration of Docker containers (and thus a competitor to Tutum). I don’t have a lot of experience with ECS yet, but it looks pretty solid so far. I found there was a real lack of documentation on how to deploy updated Docker images to Amazon, however, and was forced to do some research in order to figure out how it should be done.

In this post I will detail how to achieve (almost) zero downtime deployment of Docker containers with the Tutum Docker hosting service. Tutum is a service that really simplifies deploying with Docker, and it even has special facilities for enabling zero downtime deployment, i.e. the Tutum team has a version of HAProxy that can switch seamlessly between Docker containers in tandem with Tutum’s API. There is the caveat though, that at the time of writing, there is slight downtime involved with HAProxy’s switching of containers, typically a few seconds.

I have recently implemented continuous deployment of my MuzHack Web application to the Docker hosting service Tutum, in both production and staging versions. I am really pleased with the smoothness of the whole process of setting it up, and the ease of day-to-day administration. Docker Image Definition The very first thing I had to do was to define MuzHack’s Docker image. This is done in the so-called Dockerfile. I base it off the standard Node image.