The appearance of containers and their performance benefits compared to the existing paradigm of virtual machines has forced several companies to rethink their software lifecycle, especially the delivery part. Continuous integration and deployment tools (CI/CD) are passing through a second renaissance phase which is characterized by new approaches centered around short-lived environments that are launched and destroyed in a much more dynamic way.

Now that we know the advantages of leveraging Ketch over other tools such as Helm to ease the deployment of our applications (BLOG: Helm vs. Ketch when Deploying Applications), a good next step is for us to understand how we can tie Ketch to our CI pipeline and have an automated deployment process. For this example, we will leverage Ketch, GitHub Actions, and a Kubernetes cluster on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE).

When I started working at Purple managing the E-commerce stack, I inherited a single AWS EC2 instance that represented our entire infrastructure. The problem was, the company was doubling in size every few months, and with this exponential increase in load combined with the issues we were already experiencing with this infrastructure, it became a large business risk.