Creating a Web Service
In this section, you will learn how to run a web server (nginx) using Kubernetes.
A Pod is the smallest deployable unit of computing that you can create and manage in Kubernetes. A Pod holds one (or more) containers. For more detailed information, refer to the Pods overview in the Kubernetes documentation.
The following steps show how to create a Pod in Kubernetes that runs a single Nginx container. We assume that you have a working cluster, and working kubectl configurations as set up in previous sections of this tutorial.
Creating a Pod
Create a new Pod called
webserverusing a webserver container image. We are using nginx as an example here:
$ kubectl run --image=nginx webserver pod/webserver created
If you have used
docker runbefore, this command should look familiar. It starts a Pod with an nginx image.
Check that your Pod has started up and is running:
$ kubectl get pods NAME READY STATUS RESTARTS AGE webserver 0/1 ContainerCreating 0 5s
Initially the status will show
ContainerCreating. After a few seconds you should see the status change to
$ kubectl get po NAME READY STATUS RESTARTS AGE webserver 1/1 Running 0 21s
Check the details of your Pod:
$ kubectl describe pod webserver Name: webserver Namespace: default Node: kube-t7qvtfd34sbg-minion-0/10.0.0.80 <...snipped...> Events: Type Reason Age From Message ---- ------ ---- ---- ------- Normal Scheduled 3m10s default-scheduler Successfully assigned default/webserver to kube-t7qvtfd34sbg-minion-0 Normal Pulling 3m8s kubelet, kube-t7qvtfd34sbg-minion-0 Pulling image "nginx" Normal Pulled 3m kubelet, kube-t7qvtfd34sbg-minion-0 Successfully pulled image "nginx" Normal Created 3m kubelet, kube-t7qvtfd34sbg-minion-0 Created container webserver Normal Started 3m kubelet, kube-t7qvtfd34sbg-minion-0 Started container webserver
Set up direct access to the Pod using the
$ kubectl port-forward pod/webserver 8000:80 Forwarding from 127.0.0.1:8000 -> 80 Forwarding from [::1]:8000 -> 80
You can now make requests to the running Pod by visiting port 8000 in a web browser on your local machine: http://localhost:8000. You should see the default “Welcome to nginx!” page.
In this section we requested Kubernetes to run an
nginx image. When
we did this, Kubernetes performed the following (simplifed) steps:
The Kubernetes master scheduled the Pod to run on a free Node in the cluster
The node started a Pod
The node fetched the image from Docker Hub, based on the given image name; i.e. https://hub.docker.com/nginx
The node created a container with the image and started it inside the Pod
port-forward command is useful for testing out your pods,
it requires access to the Kubernetes API. This is not available to the regular
users who will access your service. In the next section we will set up access to
your Pod from the Internet by setting up a load balancer.