This blog post is for the person interested in Kubernetes and Docker but hasn’t fully taken the leap, or is using them and interested in a wholistic view of how they help drive value for their business. For the purposes of this article we will over simplify and say Docker is the packaging system and Kubernetes is the orchestrator.

If we start to think about what it means to unify the path (using pipelines) to production, is to start thinking about how your organization ships software from development (left) to production (right). If you will indulge me in the basics of Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) for a moment, you essentially want a way to produce artifacts, sign-off on those artifacts through what ever means of testing/validation you require, and finally, a way to get those signed-off artifacts delivered to production. The real secret sauce behind unifying the path to production is having consistent ways to achieve the basic outcomes of CI/CD. Docker and Kubernetes can help you get there, let me explain:

Starting from development (left), Docker can be used as a packaging system. Docker images are built from a Dockerfile, and by nature, Dockerfiles are checked into source control together with the application code. This places the onus on the application developers to define how their application is built and run. By using Docker’s build tools to create standardized pipelines, which consist of docker build, docker push, and docker tag commands enable the tooling used for continuous integration (CI) of the artifacts. One of the main benefits of producing immutable artifacts is that they can be used in local development and deployed across environments in a consistent, low risk way. This consistency gives you the guarantee that as you do validations, you can expect with a high degree of certainty that the software will behave the same way in production.

Docker and Kubernetes

Having consistent ways to build, and deploy your software across your organization. A key way that this can be done is by leveraging Docker and Kubernetes. These tools help provide a unified path to production by helping to standardize the build process for immutable artifacts, providing a low risk way to validate artifacts across environments, and provide a clear, version-able, way to deploy your application across environments.