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Creating a DevOps workflow to optimize application deployments to your Kubernetes cluster can be a complex journey. I recently demonstrated how to optimize your local K8s development workflow with Rancher Desktop and Skaffold. If you haven’t seen it yet, you can watch it by viewing the video below. You might be wondering, “What happens next?” How do you extend this solution beyond a local setup to a real-world pipeline with a remote cluster?

This article was inspired by our recent "5 tools to increase Kubernetes developer productivity" video, hosted by Saiyam Pathak and Kunal Kushwaha. Over the years Kubernetes has become the de facto orchestration platform, as such it's crucial that developers have the right set of tools to increase their productivity for development and operations. In this article, we take a look at five such tools that can help developers inprove productivity while when Kubernetes. Let’s jump in.

Continuing on from Part One where we went through a brief history of containers and Kubernetes then Dockerized a NodeJS application, now we are ready to deploy to Kubernetes. If this is your first or nth time deploying to Kubernetes, Shipa makes this simple. You don’t have to worry about authoring multiple Kubernetes manifests and templates to deploy your application, all you need is an image.

Today, I was working on our Terraform Provider, and I noticed that I never tried to deploy an application from scratch on a new and clean AWS account. Meaning, an empty AWS account - with 0 resources created. No VPC, no EC2, no Load Balancer, nothing... just an IAM user to get access to my AWS account programmatically. This post explains what I did and how it took 37 minutes and 33 seconds to literally: 😅 Let's explain all of that!

Why this combination you ask? Load testing is my passion, and I am partial to Kubernetes. I challenged myself to share a use case that many could relate to, focused on a business critical application. Websites came to mind and WordPress is the world’s most popular website management system. Of course, nginx is the most popular web server so let’s throw that into the mix. And Kubernetes? With more than 50% of corporations adopting Kubernetes in 2021, what better system to run in.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk is an AWS-managed service. It is used by startups, small & mid-sized businesses for web application development. As it comes pre-configured with EC2 server and is efficient at using automatic provisioning of services and resources, handling application code and environment configurations seems easier with this PaaS solution. AWS Elastic Beanstalk is a go-to option for various startups, small & mid-sized businesses.

Since its introduction in 2014 to the world, Kubernetes has been helping usher in the next generation of distributed workloads. As workloads started to be containerized, so did the need to manage the containers, thus the inception of container orchestrators. There have been a few container orchestrators out there before Kubernetes such as Docker Swarm and Apache Mesos. Though as a feature developer, Kubernetes can certainly feel like an 800-pound gorilla in the room.

The rise of cloud native and containerization, along with the automation of the CI/CD pipeline, introduced fundamental changes to existing application development, deployment, and security paradigms. Because cloud native is so different from traditional architectures, both in how workloads are developed and how they need to be secured, there is a need to rethink our approach to security in these environments.