Today, consumers are digitally savvy and need to buy products and services online; therefore, businesses need a robust digital presence. There has been a rise in the need for application development across sectors since enterprises need software applications to reach their target market with a personalized touch.

The explosive growth in software application requirements has played a critical role in transforming the software development industry, where developers are trying to cope with increased demand through automation. The DevOps approach & Agile principles have been developed where developers closely work with infrastructure engineers using a CI/CD pipeline to ensure their applications are deployed with speed & reliability.

Moreover, business organizations are rapidly shifting from monolith applications to microservices, which has brought containerization technology into the spotlight. Many business applications run in containers, so a tool is needed to efficiently manage and orchestrate these containers.

Google introduced Kubernetes(K8s)- an open-source container orchestration tool with essential features of scalability & flexibility that enabled businesses to make their deployment processes more efficient.

With the increasing interest and utilization of containerization technology for its explicit benefits and the use of Kubernetes clusters for deploying applications, it has become necessary to implement CI/CD pipelines. These pipelines are crucial in ensuring the automated delivery of Kubernetes. Moreover, CI/CD pipeline implementation for cloud-native applications helps to make delivery more robust while optimizing the development & deployment workflows.

Two Types of Kubernetes-based CI/CD Pipelines

Push-based Pipelines:

In a push-based pipeline, when changes are committed to a version control system repository, an external system such as a CI pipeline generates build triggers to deploy those changes to the Kubernetes cluster. In this model, the credentials for the Kubernetes cluster are exposed beyond the cluster's domain.

Pull-based Pipelines:
In a pull-based pipeline, Kubernetes operators are responsible for deploying changes from within a cluster whenever new images are pushed to the registry.

Critical Components of Kubernetes-based CI/CD Pipelines
Let’s look at the critical components of CI/CD pipelines built on Kubernetes:
• Containers like Docker enable the developers to keep the application components separate while supporting their seamless integration during runtimes.
• Configuration management helps locate the new changes in the current system and ensures the storage of all the details of the infrastructure setup.
• The next important component is the operating clusters, a system where multiple computers or servers work together to perform tasks efficiently and effectively. Once the CI/CD tool approves the containers, developers can go ahead & deploy them for your software build.
• A Version Control System, popularly termed as VCS, is a centralized source code repository. Its primary purpose is to manage & track code changes. Along with it, whenever a change is pushed to the repository, it sends the trigger alert to the CI/CD tool to initiate a new pipeline.
• The next component is image registries, which store the Docker container images. It is essential to ensure that all the images are adequately stored in the registries before they are employed in the CI/CD process. It helps to reduce the manual image pulls & pushes during the launch of updates or deployment.
• It is critical to protect the pipeline from security threats & that is ensured by maintaining audits & resorting to security testing. It helps to create a balance between faster development of applications & at the same time; the pipelines are safe from potential security threats.
• Monitoring & observability are required continuously, enabling developers to have complete transparency in the application development cycle & they can easily pull out all the required metrics & insights from the process.

Steps to Make Kubernetes-based CI/CD Pipelines More Effective

The CI/CD process is based at the core of DevOps operations to streamline the entire production environment. To construct an effective Kubernetes-based CI/CD pipeline, specific steps must be followed to achieve the desired outcomes.

Let’s take a glance at the steps that help in making the Kubernetes-based CI/CD pipeline more efficient:

• Choose the CI/CD pipeline tool that smoothly integrates with Kubernetes and helps to automate the process of building, testing & deploying the applications.
• Employing a staging environment that matches the production environment that supports staging the application, testing it & removing the bugs before moving it to the production environment.
• A rollback strategy is always crucial as it enables developers to restore the original application if something goes wrong during deployment. It helps to bring things on track if anything goes astray.

• Monitoring the CI/CD pipelines using tools like Grafana and Prometheus can help to monitor the pipelines and ensure that they run as per the predetermined results.
• Ensuring the Kubernetes infrastructure updates are reflected in the CI/CD pipelines to ensure that you work in an environment that is updated & helps in optimizing the entire process.

Best Practices for Building Efficient Kubernetes CI/CD Pipelines

• Make Use of GitOps: For reliable deployment of applications, all the operations in the process should be monitored closely. This is done by GitOps, which employs Git version control to manage the configuration files & keep a close track of all the versions deployed, ensuring a high-reliability factor of applications. Additionally, GitOps can be used to support scaling the more complicated Kubernetes deployments. It is accomplished effectively as the entire infrastructure configuration is stored in Git and can be smoothly managed by the team of developers.
• Employing Helm for Packaging Applications: Helm supports simplifying the entire process of package management on Kubernetes by providing the packaged applications termed as charts. Its ability to assist in creating repeated deployments makes it a preferred choice for developers. At the same time, they can customize the applications without resorting to writing additional codes or scripts. Moreover, Helm charts have version controls, so rollouts become quick if needed, and as the Helm charts are stored in Helm centralized repositories, the developers can quickly locate & share charts.

• Ensuring Security Best Practices: The biggest challenge for business organizations is maintaining data privacy. And it becomes more complex when dealing with sensitive data & often, the security environment within Kubernetes is ignored. Therefore, implementing Kubernetes security measures using authorization policies & authentication models helps secure the clusters against unauthorized usage, particularly on managed resources on Kubernetes clusters. Moreover, scanning container images at the time of building the application ensures that safety is maintained in the environment while catching the malicious players right from the start.

• Employment of Canart/Blue Green Deployment Patterns: The application's production environment needs to be reliable & stable, & employment of canary/blue-green patterns enables identifying and addressing potential issues without impacting the functionality of applications or user experience. Canary deployment helps test the new feature release to a limited number of users so that update rollback can be done if the desirable result is not achieved. The blue/green deployment patterns allow developers to switch the traffic between old & current application versions, enabling the older version to run efficiently till the bugs have been fixed in the testing phase of the newer version.

• Avoiding Confidential Information & Configurations in Containers: It is vital to ensure that container images shouldn’t have sensitive information like API keys, passwords, or tokens. The best practice is to use the external source of storing this information, including Hashicop Vault or AWS Secret Manager, and retrieve this information during deployment using tools like Helm Charts. It ensures that the confidential information is secured in encrypted form & container images don’t have sensitive data even if these are shared with other services or their security is compromised.
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Tools Used for Kubernetes CI/CD Pipelines

• GitHub Action: An open-source CI/CD tool that supports automated pipelines for building, testing & deployment of applications. This tool is preferably recommended when the source code repository is GitHub.

• Jenkins: An open-source tool that helps developers in automated pipelines for building, testing, and deploying applications in multiple cloud or hybrid cloud environments. It also incorporates Jenkins, X-the latest update that supports automated CI/CD pipelines for orchestration tools like Kubernetes & Docker, and also supports cloud-native containerization applications.

• Drone CI: An open-source tool that is built on Docker and takes advantage of a container-first approach. It offers flexibility with a wide range of tools & environments, but the only criterion is that the developers must integrate it with the Git repository. Its components, plugins & pipeline stages are mainly deployed and executed as Docker containers.
• Argo CD: A lightweight, easy-to-use tool designed as a declarative GitOps continuous delivery tool that is mainly built for Kubernetes. Its foremost reliability is on Git, which makes it a secure tool with enhanced security, easy access control & permission management.
• GitLab CI/CD: If developers need a CI/CD tool without any third-party integrations, then the GitLab CI/CD tool is recommended, ensuring continuous building, testing, and deployment of applications in a secure environment.

Conclusion

Kubernetes is becoming a critical component of CI/CD pipelines, with its powerful features that support automating application building, testing & deployment faster and more reliably. The challenges in establishing the CI/CD pipeline based on Kubernetes can be easily overcome by following the best practices & steps to ensure that the pipeline is effective. It is a powerful tool that enables the organization to use it for application development, & deployment or storage management. Whatever its usage, its potential to bring business organizations closer to delivering the best quality applications is unsurpassable, making it the preferred choice for building reliable applications faster and more accurately.