Microservices, Continuous Integration and Delivery, Docker, DevOps, Infrastructure as Code-these are the current trends and buzzwords in the technological world of 2020. A popular tool which can facilitate the deployment and maintenance of microservices is Kubernetes. Kubernetes is a platform for running containerized applications, for example microservices. There are two main questions which answer was important for us: how to deploy Kubernetes itself and how to ensure that the deployment fulfils the needs of a production environment. Our research concentrates on the analysis and evaluation of Kubernetes cluster as the software production environment. However, firstly it is necessary to determine and evaluate the requirements of production environment. The paper presents the determination and analysis of such requirements and their evaluation in the case of Kubernetes cluster. Next, the paper compares two methods of deploying a Kubernetes cluster: kops and eksctl. Both of the methods concern the AWS cloud, which was chosen mainly because of its wide popularity and the range of provided services. Besides the two chosen methods of deployment, there are many more, including the DIY method and deploying on-premises.
Keywords: Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS); Amazon Web Services (AWS); Kubernetes; operations automation; production environment; software production environment.