Deployment

Deployment strategies for microservices can be similar to deploying monoliths, described in a previous section.

However, when managing a constellation of microservices things get trickier, and this is where an orchestrator comes handy.

In some instances, companies have used their own tooling to deploy and orchestrate microservice deployment, even without containers.

It has also been typical to see using containers, but in a raw way, with some Infrastucture as Code (IAC) or Configuration as Code (CAC) tooling like Ansible, Chef or Puppet handling the docker CLI directly for managing the microservices lifecycle.

Whatever floats your boat, there is no silver bullet here, but replicating this tooling again and again for different applications is costly and error-prone. Orchestrators can greatly help in making this user experience uniform across different environments and infrastructure; also, and as we'll discover later they can greatly respond to external change, trying to ensure that our constraints are always met, when possible.

This was the spirit in which Kubernetes was conceived, and this is why for the remaining on this book we will deploy our microservices on top of an orchestrator. Kubernetes in our case.