hands-on lab

Deploying Containerized Applications on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)

Difficulty: Beginner

Duration: Up to 1 hour and 15 minutes

Students: 3,335

Rating: 4.3/5

Start lab

Get guided in a real environmentPractice with a step-by-step scenario in a real, provisioned environment.

Learn and validateUse validations to check your solutions every step of the way.

See resultsTrack your knowledge and monitor your progress.

Description

Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) is a managed cloud service for deploying, managing, and scaling your containerized applications using Kubernetes and Google Cloud infrastructure. In this lab you will learn different ways to deploy applications and manage a GKE cluster. You will first deploy a single-container game application followed by a multi-container application (WordPress) provided by the Google Cloud Platform Marketplace. Along the way, you will learn about the architecture of GKE clusters, how to connect to GKE clusters using the popular Kubernetes command line tool kubectl, and understand some of the ways that GKE integrates with other Google Cloud services.

Lab Objectives

Upon completion of this lab you will be able to:

Understand the architecture of Google Kubernetes Engine clusters and how GKE integrates with other Google Cloud services
Monitor Google Kubernetes Engine cluster components from the Cloud Console
Deploy containerized applications from the Console and Marketplace
Manage Kubernetes resources from the Cloud Console and Google Cloud Shell with kubectl

Lab Prerequisites

You should be familiar with:

Working at the command line in Linux
Kubernetes basics including the main components of a Kubernetes cluster

The following labs are recommended for satisfying the prerequisites:

Updates

June 27th, 2024 - Updated to use Kubernetes version 1.30

January 16th, 2024 - Updated the screenshots & instructions to reflect the latest UI

May 19th, 2023 - Updated to use Kubernetes version 1.26

March 28th, 2023 - Resolved periodic environment error

February 9th, 2023 - Resolved GKE marketplace issue

December 12th, 2022 - Resolved authorization error with GKE

March 21st, 2022 - Updated student permissions

December 20th, 2021 - Removed reference to Cloud Shell (The lab commands should be entered in the ca-lab-vm SSH browser terminal)

October 8th, 2021 - Updated to use Kubernetes version 1.21 and updated instructions to reflect the latest console experience

July 7th, 2021 - Updated content to reflect the latest console experience and changed the deployment container image to use a Google Container Registry image

April 6th, 2021 - Updated to use Kubernetes version 1.18

March 20th, 2020 - Updated to use Kubernetes version 1.15 and added a check to validate the work performed in the lab

October 23rd, 2019 - Updated instructions and screenshots as well as resolved an issue that prevented deploying from the Marketplace

June 6th, 2019 - Updated to use Kubernetes version 1.13