A Guide on How to Deploy a React App on Kubernetes

Deploying a React app can be as simple as pushing static files to a content delivery network—but if you're building something more dynamic, scalable, or team-oriented, you may need more than that. That’s where Kubernetes comes in. It offers a powerful way to manage, scale, and automate app deployments using containers. In this guide, we'll walk through how to deploy a React app on Kubernetes, why this approach might be right for your use case, and how to get started using tools like Microtica to simplify the process—especially if you're targeting AWS.

Why Deploy React Apps on Kubernetes

If you're exploring how to deploy a React app with a long-term strategy in mind, Kubernetes offers benefits beyond basic hosting. It's designed for scalability, resilience, and automation.

Auto-scaling Capabilities

Kubernetes makes it easy to handle spikes in traffic with horizontal pod autoscaling. Based on CPU or memory usage (or even custom metrics), Kubernetes can automatically spin up or reduce the number of pods running your React app.

This ensures your app performs consistently—even under sudden demand—without requiring manual intervention or overprovisioning.

Canary and Blue-Green Deployments

Deploying React apps with zero downtime is possible using canary or blue-green deployment strategies:

• Canary deployments let you roll out new features to a small percentage of users before going full scale.
  
• Blue-green deployments allow you to switch traffic between two separate environments, ensuring safe rollbacks if something breaks.
  

These techniques reduce risk and improve deployment confidence—especially useful in fast-paced development environments.

Easy Rollback and Version Control

When you deploy with Kubernetes, every rollout is versioned. If something goes wrong during a new release, Kubernetes lets you roll back to the previous stable version with a single command.

This built-in rollback feature provides peace of mind and makes it easier to adopt continuous delivery without fear of breaking production.

A/B Testing

Want to test two variations of your React app with live users? Kubernetes makes A/B testing straightforward:

• Deploy two versions of your app in separate pods.
  
• Use routing rules (via ingress controllers or service meshes) to split traffic between them.
  
• Analyze performance, user behavior, or conversion rates before deciding on a winner.
  
  

This flexibility helps teams ship smarter features based on real user data, not guesswork.

Common Ways to Deploy a React App

There are several methods you can use when deciding how to deploy a React app. Each comes with its own advantages, depending on your goals, traffic expectations, and infrastructure preferences. Here’s a breakdown of some of the most common deployment options:

AWS S3 + CloudFront

One of the most cost-effective ways to deploy a React app is using Amazon S3 combined with CloudFront for content delivery. With this method:

• Your React app is built into static files using npm run build.
  
• The static files are uploaded to an S3 bucket configured for website hosting.
  
• CloudFront acts as a global CDN, caching your assets and serving them quickly to users.
  

This method works well for most client-side rendered React apps and is popular for its speed and simplicity. However, it doesn't support advanced deployment strategies like blue-green rollouts or container orchestration.

Docker Containers

Packaging your React app into a Docker container allows you to standardize deployment across environments. With Docker:

• You can build a lightweight image containing your app and a web server like Nginx.
  
• The image can be pushed to a container registry and deployed to any Docker-compatible host.
  
• This method enables portability and better control over the runtime environment.
  

It's a good option when you want to move beyond static hosting and start preparing for more scalable deployments.

Kubernetes for Advanced Use Cases

For teams that need high availability, dynamic scaling, and seamless rollout capabilities, Kubernetes is a powerful choice. It allows you to:

• Deploy your Dockerized React app into pods on a Kubernetes cluster.
  
• Use deployment strategies like rolling updates or blue-green deployments.
  
• Integrate monitoring, scaling, and CI/CD workflows at scale.
  

Although it's a more complex setup, Kubernetes is often the answer when learning how to deploy a React app in a production-grade environment with modern DevOps practices.

Step-by-Step: How to Deploy React App on Kubernetes Using Microtica

To deploy React on AWS, you need the following templates:

• Amazon EKS
• ReactJS

This will setup a production-ready solution in less than 20 minutes. Click Deploy with Microtica below and follow the template steps to deploy your ReactJS application on your AWS account. First, you need to create a Microtica account by signing up with your email or your Git account. If you want to be able to deploy a react app, you must have an AWS account. If you do not have one, you should sign up for an AWS account.

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1. Create Git Repository

Once you signup for Microtica, you’ll be presented with the Onboarding screen, and there you can find the ReactJS template. Clicking the Deploy app button will lead you to the Templates page - a list of Microtica’s production-ready templates. There you can also find the ReactJS template and select it. 

The first step is connecting a Git account. Microtica supports the major Git providers, like GitHub, Bitbucket, GitLab and CodeCommit. Once you connect your preferred provider, you’ll see the section change into creating a repository where your ReactJS app code will reside. 

Microtica defines a repo name by default for each template, but you can change it. We will create a new repository on your account with the provided name, and every Git push will be deployed automatically in Microtica.

This template is bootstrapped with Create React App.

If you already have a ReactJS application source code, you will need to import your existing application in Microtica.

2. Customize the Template

After creating your repository, you need to give your application a name in Microtica, to be able to distinguish it from other apps in the Applications tab.

You can customize this template to meet your requirements with environment variables. You can update the configuration later in App Settings.

3. Create an EKS cluster

In step number three, you can choose the Kubernetes cluster where your application will deploy. Deploying on your AWS account means you need to create an AWS managed-Kubernetes (EKS) cluster, and you can start that process by clicking on the Create Amazon EKS Cluster button. 

We recommend deploying your production applications on AWS, as it gives you full ownership of your cloud infrastructure and applications.

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Clicking the Create Amazon EKS Cluster button will open the popup shown in the image above. Here you select the environment in which you want this cluster to be deployed. If you don't have an existing environment, you can create one by selecting the Create Environment action from the dropdown menu.

After selecting an environment, you need to select an AWS account and region where the EKS cluster will be deployed. If you haven’t connected an AWS account yet, you can do it right here by clicking the Connect AWS Account button. This will initiate a CloudFormation stack that will give Microtica permissions to provision infrastructure on your AWS account. Once you create the stack, the connection will be established automatically and you'll be able to see the AWS account in the dropdown list of accounts.

Select the account, select a region, and then click on Continue to move to the deployment of your environment.

4. Deploying the ReactJS app to Kubernetes

Once you’ve selected the cluster, you will see a summary of all the previous steps and what will be deployed with this template.

Clicking the Deploy button will trigger a deployment of the environment and start creating the infrastructure (the EKS cluster), deploying it on your AWS account, and then deploying the application on that infrastructure. 

It will take approximately 15-20 mins for the React app to be deployed on a new EKS cluster. You can follow the detailed real-time deployment logs by clicking the View deployment button.

When the deployment of a new EKS cluster is finished, click the View logs button to follow the deployment process of the React app.

5. Access the application

When the deployment is finished, you will see a View Application button leading you to the app Overview tab.

Since you deployed on your EKS cluster on AWS, you need to expose your application to the internet, so follow this guide to enable external access to your apps.

For even more information, you can also look at the Deployments and Monitoring tabs, where you have the pipeline history, resource consumption metrics, and logs for your instances.

Troubleshooting Common Issues

Even with the best deployment process in place, running into hiccups is part of the journey when you deploy a React app—especially when using tools like Kubernetes for developers, Docker, or AWS. Here are some common issues and how to solve them.

Routing Issues with React Router

If you're using React Router for client-side navigation, you might notice 404 errors when refreshing a page or accessing a nested route directly. This usually happens because:

• The server tries to locate a file at the specific route path, but your app is a single-page app.
  
• Kubernetes ingress or the Nginx server isn't redirecting requests to index.html.
  
  

Solution: Ensure your web server is configured to redirect all non-static file requests to index.html. For Nginx, add this in your config:

nginx
CopyEdit
location / {  
	try_files $uri /index.html;
   }

Also, make sure your Kubernetes ingress rules aren't overriding this behavior.

CORS Issues from Frontend to Backend APIs

If your React app is calling external APIs or a backend service, you might run into CORS (Cross-Origin Resource Sharing) errors. These errors block requests from your frontend when the backend doesn’t explicitly allow them.

Solution:

• Make sure the backend includes appropriate Access-Control-Allow-Origin headers.
  
• Use proxying during development or route API requests through the same domain in production.
  
• If your backend is containerized and deployed within the same Kubernetes cluster, expose it via a service and internal DNS name to avoid cross-origin calls.

Addressing CORS issues early helps maintain a smooth connection between your frontend and backend, especially as your app scales.

Failed Deployments

Sometimes, the deployment process might hang, fail, or produce vague error messages. Common reasons include:

• Incorrect Dockerfile or build context.
  
• Insufficient permissions on your AWS account.
  
• Configuration mismatches between environments (missing secrets, environment variables, etc.).
  

Solution:

• Use Kubernetes logs: kubectl logs [pod-name] to diagnose what went wrong.
  
• Check resource limits in your pod spec if containers crash on startup.
  
• Validate your CI/CD configuration if you're using automated pipelines.

Taking the time to pinpoint the root cause using these steps can save hours of guesswork and get your deployment back on track.

Best Practices After Deployment

Once you’ve learned how to deploy a React app and have it running in production, the next step is making sure it runs smoothly and scales efficiently. Here are best practices to follow after the initial deployment.

Set Up Autoscaling Policies

Don’t leave performance to chance. Use Kubernetes’ Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA) to scale your app up or down automatically based on metrics like CPU or custom usage indicators. This helps you maintain app responsiveness without overpaying for unused resources.

Use Monitoring Tools

Observability plays a major role in maintaining a stable system once you’ve figured out how to deploy react app code in a production environment. After deployment, it's important to monitor system metrics, resource usage, and application logs. Good monitoring helps detect issues early, track unusual patterns, and improve overall stability. It also gives you data to make informed decisions about scaling and infrastructure changes.

Add CI/CD Workflows for Ongoing Updates

Once you’ve set up how to deploy react app on your infrastructure, the next step is to automate updates. A CI/CD workflow can build and test your app with every change, package the code for deployment, and roll out updates to your environment. This reduces manual steps, avoids human error, and keeps your app continuously improving without disruption.

Compress Static Assets

When learning how to deploy react app efficiently, optimizing your assets matters. React applications often include large files—scripts, stylesheets, images, and fonts. Compressing these static assets by minifying code and reducing file sizes helps decrease load times. This creates a smoother user experience, especially for users with slower connections.

Use a CDN Layer

Even after deploying your app to a stable infrastructure, adding a content delivery layer can significantly improve performance. A CDN caches static files closer to the user, reducing latency and decreasing the load on your servers. This improves availability, reduces bandwidth costs, and speeds up delivery across different regions.

Conclusion

Learning how to deploy a React app involves more than just getting it to run. Choosing the right infrastructure—like Kubernetes on AWS—unlocks powerful deployment strategies and better long-term scalability. But once deployed, success depends on your ability to monitor, troubleshoot, and continuously optimize the app.

From resolving common issues like routing and CORS errors to implementing best practices such as autoscaling and CI/CD pipelines, each step brings you closer to a stable, production-grade setup.

As your app grows, Kubernetes offers the flexibility and control needed to manage complex deployments, version rollouts, and performance tuning—all while supporting modern DevOps workflows.