Introduction to Kustomize

[dystewart]

If you are familiar and comfortable with Kustomize you can safely skip this section.
If you are new to Kustomize or just need a basic refresher, here are some of the resources me and a few other beginners found very helpful:

1. Kustomize installation docs
2. Getting started with Kustomize tool for Kubernetes
3. Kustomize tutorial with instructions & examples
4. Declarative Management of Kubernetes Objects Using Kustomize

Kustomize is an integral and necessary tool that helps us to decoratively deploy our applications in our OpenShift environment by bundling all of our manifests together. That is, it allows us to easily specify application configurations and fine tune how the applications are deployed and managed. As you can tell, this idea of declarative deployment is very powerful tool since it prevents the need for an administrator to make configuration changes to an application every time we deploy it.

Make sure you're comfortable with Kustomize before moving on as we'll be using it early and often in this walkthrough.