KUBERNETES: THE KOPS WAY (PART-1)
Updated: Jul 30, 2020

INTRODUCTION
We all know that Kubernetes is a hot shot technology and most popular container orchestration tool. There are a number of ways to deploy a Kubernetes cluster on AWS such as below.
Kubernetes the hard way
Kubernetes installation with kubeadm
EKS cluster deployment with AWS console or via terraform/aws cli or cloud formation
KOPS
In this article we are going to study about KOPS
Before proceeding with creating a kubernetes cluster with KOPS, lets briefly talk about what kubernetes is all about ?
WHAT IS KUBERNETES ?
Kubernetes is an open source, container orchestration platform. Applications packaged as Docker images can be easily deployed, scaled, and managed in a Kubernetes cluster. Some of the key features of Kubernetes are:
Self-healing
Horizontal Scaling
Service discovery and load balancing
Application upgrades and rollbacks
WHAT IS KOPS ?
We like to think of it as kubectl for clusters.
kops helps you create, destroy, upgrade and maintain production-grade, highly available, Kubernetes clusters from the command line. AWS (Amazon Web Services) is currently officially supported, with GCE and OpenStack in beta support, and other platforms planned.
KOPS SALIENT FEATURES
Automates the provisioning of Kubernetes clusters in AWS and GCE
Deploys Highly Available (HA) Kubernetes Masters
Built on a state-sync model for dry-runs and automatic idempotency
Ability to generate Terraform
Supports custom Kubernetes add-ons
Command line autocompletion
YAML Manifest Based API Configuration
Templating and dry-run modes for creating Manifests
Choose from eight different CNI Networking providers out-of-the-box
Supports upgrading from kube-up
Capability to add containers, as hooks, and files to nodes via a cluster manifest
This is it for this article, here we just discussed about what kubernetes and KOPS are theoretically. In the next article , we will do the hands-on and deploy a 3 node kubernetes cluster on AWS.
Happy Reading :)