Deploying a Scalable E‑Commerce Platform on a 10‑Node Kubernetes Cluster

Overview

The document presents a practical case study of running an e‑commerce application on Kubernetes, illustrating how a 10‑node K8s cluster can be configured and used in production to achieve high availability and scalability.

Cluster Specification

Node count: 10

Node specification: each node has an 8‑core CPU and 32 GB RAM

Containers per node: 10 container instances

Network configuration: VPC network with internal load balancer for inter‑node communication

Architecture

Master node: handles cluster management, scheduling, and control‑plane operations.

Worker nodes: run container instances and execute commands from the master.

Application Components

Frontend app: React‑based UI, containerized and deployed on the cluster.

Backend app: Node.js service managing product catalog and orders, also containerized.

Database: MySQL relational database stored on a Persistent Volume for data durability.

Load balancer: Kubernetes internal load balancer distributes traffic from the frontend to multiple backend instances, ensuring high availability.

Deployment Process

Configure the Kubernetes cluster, including installation of master and worker nodes.

Create Docker images for the frontend and backend applications and push them to a container registry.

Write YAML manifests to define Deployments, Services, Ingress, PersistentVolume, and PersistentVolumeClaim, and set resource quotas and autoscaling policies.

Deploy the applications using kubectl apply -f <manifest> and perform horizontal scaling as needed.

Expose the frontend via a Service and Ingress, configuring load‑balancing rules for external traffic.

Set up Persistent Volume and Persistent Volume Claim for MySQL, binding the storage to the backend deployment.

Configure monitoring and logging (e.g., Prometheus, ELK) to collect performance metrics and logs from the cluster and applications.

Implement health checks, failover mechanisms, and automatic scaling to maintain high availability and reliability.

References

Kubernetes official documentation: https://kubernetes.io/docs/

Kubernetes Chinese documentation: https://kubernetes.io/zh/docs/

Docker official documentation: https://docs.docker.com/

MySQL official documentation: https://dev.mysql.com/doc/