Introducing containers

If you're not familiar with containerized workloads at all, this tutorial is for you. It introduces you to containers and container orchestration by walking you through setting up a simple application from source code to a container running on GKE.

This tutorial doesn't require any previous experience with containers or Kubernetes. However, if you want to read an overview of core Kubernetes terminology before starting this tutorial, see Start learning about Kubernetes (or if you'd prefer to learn about Kubernetes in comic form, see our Kubernetes comic). You'll find more detailed resources in the What's next section at the end of the tutorial.

If you're already familiar with containers and Kubernetes, you can skip this tutorial and start learning about GKE itself.

Objectives

Explore a simple multi-service "hello world" application.
Run the application from source.
Containerize the application.
Create a Kubernetes cluster.
Deploy the containers to the cluster.

Before you begin

Take the following steps to enable the Kubernetes Engine API:

Visit the Kubernetes Engine page in the Google Cloud console.
Create or select a project.
Wait for the API and related services to be enabled. This can take several minutes.
Make sure that billing is enabled for your Google Cloud project.

Prepare Cloud Shell

This tutorial uses Cloud Shell, which provisions a g1-small Compute Engine virtual machine (VM) running a Debian-based Linux operating system.

Using Cloud Shell has the following advantages:

A Python 3 development environment (including virtualenv) is fully setup.
The gcloud, docker, git, and kubectl command-line tools used in this tutorial are already installed.
You have your choice of built-in text editors:
- Cloud Shell Editor, which you access by clicking Open Editor at the top of the Cloud Shell window.
- Emacs, Vim, or Nano, which you access from the command-line in Cloud Shell.

In the Google Cloud console, activate Cloud Shell.

Activate Cloud Shell

At the bottom of the Google Cloud console, a Cloud Shell session starts and displays a command-line prompt. Cloud Shell is a shell environment with the Google Cloud CLI already installed and with values already set for your current project. It can take a few seconds for the session to initialize.

Download the sample code

Download the helloserver source code:

git clone https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/anthos-service-mesh-samples

Change to the sample code directory:

cd anthos-service-mesh-samples/docs/helloserver

Explore the multi-service application

The sample application is written in Python. It has the following components that communicate using REST:

server: A basic server with one GET endpoint, / , that prints "hello world" to the terminal window.
loadgen: A script that sends traffic to the server, with a configurable number of requests per second (RPS).

Sample application

Run the application from source

To get familiar with the sample application, run it in Cloud Shell:

From the sample-apps/helloserver directory, run the server:
```
python3 server/server.py
```
On startup, the server displays the following:
```
INFO:root:Starting server...
```
Open another terminal window so that you can send requests to the server. To do this in Cloud Shell, click Open a new tab to open another session.
In the new terminal window, send a request to the server:
```
curl http://localhost:8080
```
The output from server is the following:
```
Hello World!
```
In the same tab, change to the directory that contains the loadgen script:
```
cd anthos-service-mesh-samples/docs/helloserver/loadgen
```

Create the following environment variables:

export SERVER_ADDR=http://localhost:8080
export REQUESTS_PER_SECOND=5

Start virtualenv:
```
virtualenv --python python3 env
```
Activate the virtual environment:
```
source env/bin/activate
```
Install the requirements for loadgen:
```
pip3 install -r requirements.txt
```
Run the loadgen application to generate traffic for the server:
```
python3 loadgen.py
```
On startup, the output from loadgen is similar to the following:
```
Starting loadgen: 2024-10-11 09:49:51.798028
5 request(s) complete to http://localhost:8080
```
Now open the terminal window that's running the server. You should see messages similar to the following:
```
127.0.0.1 - - [11/Oct/2024 09:51:28] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 -
INFO:root:GET request,
Path: /
Headers:
Host: localhost:8080
User-Agent: python-requests/2.32.3
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Accept: */*
Connection: keep-alive
```
From a networking perspective, the entire application is now running on the same host, which lets you use localhost to send requests to the server.
To stop the loadgen and the server, press Ctrl-c in each terminal window.
In the loadgen terminal window, deactivate the virtual environment:
```
deactivate
```

Containerize the application

To run the application on GKE, you need to package both the components of the sample application into containers. A container is a package that contains all of the necessary elements for your application to run in any environment. This tutorial uses Docker to containerize the application.

To containerize the application with Docker, you need a Dockerfile. A Dockerfile is a text file that defines the commands needed to assemble the application source code and its dependencies into a container image. After you build the image, you upload it to a container registry, such as Artifact Registry.

The source code for this tutorial includes a Dockerfile for both the server and the loadgen with all the commands required to build the images. The following is the Dockerfile for the server:

FROM python:3.13-slim as base
FROM base as builder
RUN apt-get -qq update \
    && apt-get install -y --no-install-recommends \
        g++ \
    && rm -rf /var/lib/apt/lists/*

# Enable unbuffered logging
FROM base as final
ENV PYTHONUNBUFFERED=1

RUN apt-get -qq update \
    && apt-get install -y --no-install-recommends \
        wget

WORKDIR /helloserver

# Grab packages from builder
COPY --from=builder /usr/local/lib/python3.* /usr/local/lib/

# Add the application
COPY . .

EXPOSE 8080
ENTRYPOINT [ "python", "server.py" ]

In this file, you can see the following:

The FROM python:3-slim as base instruction tells Docker to use the latest Python 3 image as the base image.
The COPY . . instruction copies the source files from the current working directory (in this case, server.py) to the container's file system.
The ENTRYPOINT defines the instruction that is used to run the container. In this example, the instruction is similar to the one you used to run server.py from the source code.
The EXPOSE instruction specifies that the server listens on port 8080. This instruction doesn't expose any ports, but serves as documentation that you need to open port 8080 when you run the container.

Prepare to containerize the application

Before you containerize the application, you need to do some setup for the tools and services that you're going to use:

Set the default Google Cloud project for the Google Cloud CLI.
```
gcloud config set project PROJECT_ID
```

Set the default region for the Google Cloud CLI.

gcloud config set compute/region us-central1

Create the repository

To create a new repository for Docker container images in Artifact Registry, do the following:

Make sure that the Artifact Registry service is enabled in your Google Cloud project.
```
gcloud services enable artifactregistry.googleapis.com
```

Create the Artifact Registry repository:

gcloud artifacts repositories create container-intro --repository-format=docker \
    --location=us-central1 \
    --description="My new Docker repository"

Set up authentication from Docker to Artifact Registry using the Google Cloud CLI:
```
gcloud auth configure-docker us-central1-docker.pkg.dev
```

Containerize the `server`

Now it's time to containerize your application. First containerize the "hello world" server and push the image to Artifact Registry:

Change to the directory where the sample server is located:

cd ~/anthos-service-mesh-samples/docs/helloserver/server/

Build the image using the Dockerfile:
```
docker build -t us-central1-docker.pkg.dev/PROJECT_ID/container-intro/helloserver:v0.0.1 .
```
- Replace PROJECT_ID with the ID of your Google Cloud project.
The -t flag represents the Docker tag. This is the name of the image that you use when you deploy the container.

Push the image to Artifact Registry:

docker push us-central1-docker.pkg.dev/PROJECT_ID/container-intro/helloserver:v0.0.1

Containerize the `loadgen`

Next, containerize the load generator service in the same way:

Change to the directory where the sample loadgen is located:
```
cd ../loadgen
```

Build the image:

docker build -t us-central1-docker.pkg.dev/PROJECT_ID/container-intro/loadgen:v0.0.1 .

Push the image to Artifact Registry:

docker push us-central1-docker.pkg.dev/PROJECT_ID/container-intro/loadgen:v0.0.1

List the images

Get a list of the images in the repository to confirm that the images were pushed:

gcloud container images list --repository us-central1-docker.pkg.dev/PROJECT_ID/container-intro

The output should list the image names that you pushed, similar to the following:

NAME
us-central1-docker.pkg.dev/PROJECT_ID/container-intro/helloserver
us-central1-docker.pkg.dev/PROJECT_ID/container-intro/loadgen

Create a GKE cluster

At this point you could just run the containers on the Cloud Shell VM by using the docker run command. However, to run reliable production workloads you need to manage containers in a more unified way. For example, you need to make sure that the containers restart if they fail, and you need a way to scale up and start additional instances of a container to handle traffic increases.

GKE can help you meet these needs. GKE is a container orchestration platform that works by connecting VMs into a cluster. Each VM is referred to as a node. GKE clusters are powered by the Kubernetes open source cluster management system. Kubernetes provides the mechanisms through which you interact with your cluster.

To run the containers on GKE, you first need to create and then connect to a cluster:

Create the cluster:
```
gcloud container clusters create-auto container-intro
```
The gcloud command creates a cluster in the default Google Cloud project and region that you set previously.

The command to create the cluster takes a few minutes to complete. When the cluster is ready, the output is similar to the following:
```
 NAME: container-intro
 LOCATION: us-central1
 MASTER_VERSION: 1.30.4-gke.1348000
 MASTER_IP: 34.44.14.166
 MACHINE_TYPE: e2-small
 NODE_VERSION: 1.30.4-gke.1348000
 NUM_NODES: 3
 STATUS: RUNNING
```
Provide credentials to the kubectl command- line tool so that you can use it to manage the cluster:
```
gcloud container clusters get-credentials container-intro
```

Examine Kubernetes manifests

When you ran the application from the source code, you used an imperative command: python3 server.py

Imperative means verb-driven: "do this."

By contrast, Kubernetes operates on a declarative model. This means that rather than telling Kubernetes exactly what to do, you provide Kubernetes with a desired state. For example, Kubernetes starts and terminates Pods as needed so that the actual system state matches the desired state.

You specify the desired state in a file called a manifest. Manifests are written in languages like YAML or JSON and contain the specification for one or more Kubernetes objects.

The sample contains a manifest each for the server and loadgen. Each manifest specifies the desired state for the Kubernetes Deployment object (which manages running your container, packaged for management as a Kubernetes Pod) and Service (which provides an IP address for the Pod). A Pod is the smallest deployable unit of computing that you can create and manage in Kubernetes, and holds one or more containers.

The following diagram depicts the application running on GKE:

Containerized application running on
GKE

You can learn more about Pods, Deployments, and Services in Start learning about Kubernetes, or in the resources at the end of this page.

Server

First, look at the manifest for the "hello world" server:

apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: helloserver
spec:
  replicas: 1
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: helloserver
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: helloserver
    spec:
      containers:
      - image: gcr.io/google-samples/istio/helloserver:v0.0.1
        imagePullPolicy: Always
        name: main
      restartPolicy: Always
      terminationGracePeriodSeconds: 5

This manifest contains the following fields:

kind indicates the type of object.
metadata.name specifies the name of the Deployment.
The first spec field contains a description of the desired state.
spec.replicas specifies the number of desired Pods.
The spec.template section defines a Pod template. Included in the specification for the Pods is the image field, which is the name of the image to pull from Artifact Registry. In the next step, you'll update this to the new image that you just created.

The hellosvc Service is defined as follows:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: hellosvc
spec:
  ports:
  - name: http
    port: 80
    targetPort: 8080
  selector:
    app: helloserver
  type: LoadBalancer

LoadBalancer: Clients send requests to the IP address of a network load balancer, which has a stable IP address and is reachable outside of the cluster.
targetPort: Recall that the EXPOSE 8080 command in the Dockerfile doesn't actually expose any ports. You expose port 8080 so that you can reach the server container outside of the cluster. In this case, hellosvc.default.cluster.local:80 (shortname: hellosvc) maps to the helloserver Pod IP's port 8080.
port: This is the port number that other services in the cluster use when sending requests.

Load generator

The Deployment object in loadgen.yaml is similar to server.yaml. One notable difference is that the Pod specification for the loadgen Deployment has a field called env. This section defines the environment variables that are required by loadgen, which you set previously when you ran the application from source.

apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: loadgenerator
spec:
  replicas: 1
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: loadgenerator
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: loadgenerator
    spec:
      containers:
      - env:
        - name: SERVER_ADDR
          value: http://hellosvc:80/
        - name: REQUESTS_PER_SECOND
          value: '10'
        image: gcr.io/google-samples/istio/loadgen:v0.0.1
        imagePullPolicy: Always
        name: main
        resources:
          limits:
            cpu: 500m
            memory: 512Mi
          requests:
            cpu: 300m
            memory: 256Mi
      restartPolicy: Always
      terminationGracePeriodSeconds: 5

Because the loadgen doesn't accept incoming requests, the type field is set to ClusterIP. This type of Service provides a stable IP address that entities in the cluster can use, but the IP address isn't exposed to external clients.

apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: loadgensvc
spec:
  ports:
  - name: http
    port: 80
    targetPort: 8080
  selector:
    app: loadgenerator
  type: ClusterIP

Deploy the containers to GKE

To deploy the containers, you apply the manifests that specify your desired state by using kubectl.

Deploy the `server`

Change to the directory where the sample server is located:

cd ~/anthos-service-mesh-samples/docs/helloserver/server/

Open server.yaml in the Cloud Shell Editor (or your preferred text editor).
Replace the name in the image field with the name of your Docker image.
```
image: us-central1-docker.pkg.dev/PROJECT_ID/container-intro/helloserver:v0.0.1
```
Replace PROJECT_ID with your Google Cloud project ID.
- If you are using Cloud Shell Editor, the file is saved automatically. Go back to the terminal window by clicking Open terminal.
- If you are using a text editor in Cloud Shell, save and close server.yaml.

Deploy the manifest to Kubernetes:

kubectl apply -f server.yaml

The output is similar to the following:

deployment.apps/helloserver created
service/hellosvc created

Deploy the `loadgen`

Change to the directory where loadgen is located.
```
cd ../loadgen
```
Open loadgen.yaml in a text editor, as before.
Again, replace the name in the image field with the name of your Docker image.
```
image: us-central1-docker.pkg.dev/PROJECT_ID/container-intro/loadgen:v0.0.1
```
Replace PROJECT_ID with your Google Cloud project ID.
- If you are using Cloud Shell Editor, the file is saved automatically. Go back to the terminal window by clicking Open terminal.
- If you are using a text editor in Cloud Shell, save and close loadgen.yaml.

Deploy the manifest to your cluster:

kubectl apply -f loadgen.yaml

On success, the command responds with the following:

deployment.apps/loadgenerator created
service/loadgensvc created

Verify your deployment

After deploying your manifests to the cluster, verify that your containers have been deployed successfully:

Check the status of the Pods in your cluster:

kubectl get pods

The command responds with the status similar to the following:

NAME                             READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
helloserver-69b9576d96-mwtcj     1/1     Running   0          58s
loadgenerator-774dbc46fb-gpbrz   1/1     Running   0          57s

Get the application logs from the loadgen Pod. Replace POD_ID with the load generator Pod identifier from the previous output.
```
kubectl logs POD_ID
```

Get the external IP addresses of hellosvc:

kubectl get service hellosvc