On the 5th of November 2018, the IT team at Kogan.com started another hackday. This time, we set our goal on learning Kubernetes. We wanted to answer the question; how exactly can we leverage container orchestration to make our deployment process faster and more efficient?

In order to achieve our goal, we set out to deploy one of our major apps that controls customer subscription preferences with Kubernetes on two different cloud providers, Google Cloud Platform (GCP GKE) and Amazon Web Services (AWS EKS). By doing this, we hoped we could understand the pros and cons of each platform, while learning the intricacies of Kubernetes deployment at the same time.

This will be a two part blog series. The first part will be a short overview of our motivation, goals, as well as how the day actually unfolded. The second part will be more technical, focus on the approaches of the two teams, and discuss the pros and cons of each platform.