In this lesson, I am going to show you how to deploy a workload to a GKE cluster.  I have already created my cluster.  Let me show that.  I just have to navigate to the Kubernetes Engine page.  You can see that I called my cluster “demo-cluster-1”.  And I also can connect to it via kubectl.  You can see that I have not deployed anything to it yet.

So there are two main ways to deploy a workload.  First, you can use the Google web console if you wish.  To do that, click on “Workloads” in the side menu here.  Notice I don’t have any workloads deployed yet, so I get the default screen.  Then just click on “Deploy” and you are given a very simple way to deploy a container.  So pick your container image here.  By default, It provides a default NGINX web server container you can use for testing.  But you can pick a custom image stored in a Cloud Source Repository or Github or Bitbucket.

Then you set any environment variables you need for the container.  Sometimes you have to pass in port numbers or a password.  Whatever the container needs to run.  Then you set an application name to help identify it.  This one is going to be called “nginx-1”.  Here you can view the workload configuration that was automatically generated.  Notice that it is going to create three replicas or pods.  And then finally I just have to pick the cluster and then click on “Deploy”.  

So this does work, but you won’t typically use this technique since it gives you very few options.  Normally you would want to create your own configuration file.  But this does provide a quick and dirty way to do a deployment.  It looks like the deployment succeeded.  And we see it created three pods on demo-cluster-1 called “nginx-1”.

Next, let me show you the much more typical method for doing a deployment.  For this, we will be using the kubectl command line tool.  I can deploy the same container by using this command.  So this deployment will create a single pod.  And it will be called “nginx-2”.  Now if I list out all pods I can see the three instances of nginx-1 and the single instance of nginx-2.  Also, if I go back to the web console, I can refresh the screen and see both deployments.

So whether you deploy via the command line or the web console, it doesn’t really matter.  You can view the current status of everything either way.  And you can delete deployments using either method as well.  I can remove a deployment using the web console like this.  And I can remove a deployment using kubectl like this.

So there you go.  That’s a very simple example of how to deploy containers to your cluster.  I recommend reading up on all the appropriate kubectl commands if you are not already familiar with them.  Normal deployments will require a few extra steps and a bit more configuration work.  But I will leave that as something you can pick up and experiment with on your own.