Building an On-Premise Kubernetes Cluster — Part 6: Deploying, Updating, and Scaling Your Own Application

🇧🇷 Leia a versão em português aqui In Part 5 of this series, we validated the cluster end to end by deploying Nginx. Now let's go one step further: build a custom application's Docker image, publish it, get it running in the cluster, and explore day-to-day operations — version updates, rollback, and scalability (both manual and automatic). As an example, we used a simple REST API ( myapp.war ), built with Spring Boot, purely for illustration — the process applies to any application packaged as a container image. Building the application's Docker image The first step is writing the application's Dockerfile . In this example, a lightweight base image ( alpine ) was used, with Java 11 installed to run the application: FROM alpine WORKDIR /opt/app RUN apk update && apk add vim openjdk11-jre COPY runapp.sh . CMD ash runapp.sh Building the image docker image build -t oregontecnologia/myapp-api:1.0.0 . Publishing the image Before using the image in the cluster, it needs to be available in some registry — either Docker Hub or a private registry . If you'd rather host your own on-premise registry (recommended for corporate environments or those without internet access), check out the companion article on creating a local registry server . To publish to Docker Hub: docker login username: password: docker push oregontecnologia/myapp-api:1.0.0 Deploying the application With the image published, you can check the cluster's current state before proceeding: kubectl get pods -o wide kubectl get deploy -o wide Create the Deployment directly from the command line, pointing to the published image: kubectl create deploy myapp-deploy --image = oregontecnologia/myapp-api:1.0.0 Unlike previous examples in this series (where we used YAML files with kubectl apply -f ), here the Deployment is created directly via the command line with kubectl create deploy . Both approaches are valid — YAML files are more suitable when you need to version and consistently reapply configurations. Exposing the