Howto: Getting Started with Kubernetes and Basic Load Balancing

This posting describes a way to deploy a service, expose it via the NodePort, scale it to 3 and observe basic load balancing. Enjoy!

Run a microservice on Kubernetes

First create a deployment which also creates a pod. This deployment was used in several conferences to demonstrate Docker features. It’s proven as suitable container to explore load balancing for Kubernetes.

$ kubectl run micro --image=fmunz/micro --port=80

deployment "micro" created


$ kubectl get pods

NAME                           READY     STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
micro-7b99d94476-9tqx5         1/1       Running   0          5m

Expose the micro service

Before you can access the service from the outside, it has to be exposed:

$ kubectl get deployments

NAME          DESIRED   CURRENT   UP-TO-DATE   AVAILABLE   AGE
micro   1         1         1            1           7m


$ kubectl expose deployment micro --type=NodePort

service “micro” exposed

Find out its port number

$ kubectl describe service micro | grep NodePort

Scale service to 3

$ kubectl scale --replicas=3 deployment/micro

deployment "micro" scaled

$ kubectl get deployments
NAME          DESIRED   CURRENT   UP-TO-DATE   AVAILABLE   AGE
hello-nginx   3         3         3            3           1d

Explore the load balancing

Now you will have 3 pods running the micro service. Acces the service via the browser with the following URL:

http://localhost:NODE_PORT

Refresh the page 3 times. You will see that different pods will serve your request because a different IP is returned each time.