Creating a container image

Regardless of your application’s architecture, it’s very likely that you need to distribute your application as a container image to be able to leverage any of the available cloud providers since container images are now the standard unit of distribution. As we’ve learned in the What is a container-based application? section, the fact that the operations teams can manage workloads consistently and uniformly by leveraging container technology is shifting part of their responsibilities to developers, who will now have to ship their applications packaged as containers.

In the Kubernetes world, containers and container images are the way to run your application. This means that one of the main requirements to be able to deploy your application is to package it up into one or more container images and push those images to an external registry available to your Kubernetes cluster. When deployed, Kubernetes will download the container image...