Building an On-Premise Kubernetes Cluster — Part 5: Deploying Your First Container

🇧🇷 Leia a versão em português aqui In previous parts of this series, we built the cluster from scratch: prepared the environment (Part 1), installed containerd and Kubernetes (Part 2), initialized the control-plane (Part 3), and joined the workers (Part 4). With the cluster up and all nodes in Ready state, it's time to actually put it to work: let's deploy our first application. In this article, we'll use Nginx as an example — a classic use case for validating that the cluster is working end to end, from pod creation to service exposure. Organizing the files First, create a directory to organize this deployment's manifests: mkdir nginx cd nginx Keeping Kubernetes manifests organized in per-application directories is a good practice that makes maintenance and versioning (e.g., with Git) easier as the cluster grows. Creating the Deployment A Deployment is the Kubernetes object responsible for managing pod replicas, ensuring the desired number of instances is always running — and handling things like rolling updates and automatic recovery in case of failure. Create the file nginx-deployment.yaml with the following content: apiVersion : apps/v1 kind : Deployment metadata : name : nginx-deployment labels : app : nginx spec : replicas : 2 selector : matchLabels : app : nginx template : metadata : labels : app : nginx spec : containers : - name : nginx image : nginx:1.14.0 ports : - containerPort : 80 This manifest defines: 2 replicas of the Nginx pod ( replicas: 2 ), distributed across the available workers; A selector that ties the Deployment to the pods via the app: nginx label; The nginx:1.14.0 image, exposing container port 80 . Applying the Deployment With the file saved, apply it to the cluster: kubectl apply -f nginx-deployment.yaml kubectl will create the Deployment, and from there Kubernetes takes care of scheduling the 2 pods across the available workers. Checking the Deployment To confirm the Deployment was created and has the desired number of replicas running