---
title: " Cross Cluster Services - Achieving Higher Availability for your Kubernetes Applications "
date: 2016-07-14
slug: cross-cluster-services
url: /blog/2016/07/Cross-Cluster-Services
author: >
  Quinton Hoole (Google),
  Allan Naim (Google),
---

_**Editor's note:** this post is part of a [series of in-depth articles](/blog/2016/07/five-days-of-kubernetes-1-3) on what's new in Kubernetes 1.3_

As Kubernetes users scale their production deployments we’ve heard a clear desire to deploy services across zone, region, cluster and cloud boundaries. Services that span clusters provide geographic distribution, enable hybrid and multi-cloud scenarios and improve the level of high availability beyond single cluster multi-zone deployments. Customers who want their services to span one or more (possibly remote) clusters, need them to be reachable in a consistent manner from both within and outside their clusters.  

In Kubernetes 1.3, our goal was to minimize the friction points and reduce the management/operational overhead associated with deploying a service with geographic distribution to multiple clusters. This post explains how to do this.   

Note: Though the examples used here leverage Google Container Engine ([GKE](https://cloud.google.com/container-engine/)) to provision Kubernetes clusters, they work anywhere you want to deploy Kubernetes.  

Let’s get started. The first step is to create is to create Kubernetes clusters into 4 Google Cloud Platform (GCP) regions using GKE.  


- asia-east1-b
- europe-west1-b
- us-east1-b
- us-central1-b

Let’s run the following commands to build the clusters:  




```
gcloud container clusters create gce-asia-east1 \

  --scopes cloud-platform \

  --zone asia-east1-b

gcloud container clusters create gce-europe-west1 \

  --scopes cloud-platform \

  --zone=europe-west1-b

gcloud container clusters create gce-us-east1 \

  --scopes cloud-platform \

  --zone=us-east1-b

gcloud container clusters create gce-us-central1 \

  --scopes cloud-platform \

  --zone=us-central1-b
 ```


Let’s verify the clusters are created:



```
gcloud container clusters list

NAME              ZONE            MASTER\_VERSION  MASTER\_IP       NUM\_NODES  STATUS  
gce-asia-east1    asia-east1-b    1.2.4           104.XXX.XXX.XXX 3          RUNNING  
gce-europe-west1  europe-west1-b  1.2.4           130.XXX.XX.XX   3          RUNNING  
gce-us-central1   us-central1-b   1.2.4           104.XXX.XXX.XX  3          RUNNING  
gce-us-east1      us-east1-b      1.2.4           104.XXX.XX.XXX  3          RUNNING
 ```



[![](https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/LEMtlOvr6i_iK1DwVmS-ltSKU5PmjrrN287sxwvyiGH-QLjOhF25RUjVTVt4IUo-0oGXvj8bxfRFCxTZa_5Qfv_LjxglshTxcnpm73E6Uy7MgVPTiI2GevdwAogHenZIb2S6A6lr)