The importance of standards

Over the past two years, containerization technology has had tremendous growth in popularity. While Docker has been at the center of this ecosystem, there is an increasing number of players in the container space. There are already a number of alternatives to the containerization and Docker implementation itself (rkt, Garden, and so on). In addition, there is a rich ecosystem of third-party tools that enhance and complement your container infrastructure. While Kubernetes is designed to manage the state of a container and the orchestration, scheduling, and networking side of this ecosystem, the bottom line is that all of these tools form the basis to build cloud-native applications.

As we mentioned at the very beginning of this book, one of the most attractive things about containers is their ability to package our application for deployment across various environment tiers (that is, development, testing, and production) and various infrastructure providers (GCP...