What Will I Learn?

You’ll learn what Kubernetes is, where it comes from, and what it means for the future of software development and operations. You’ll learn how containers work, how to build and manage them, and how to design cloud native services and infrastructure.

You’ll understand the trade-offs between building and hosting Kubernetes clusters yourself, and using managed services. You’ll learn the capabilities, limitations, and pros and cons of popular Kubernetes installation tools such as kops, kubeadm, and Kubespray. You’ll get an informed overview of the major managed Kubernetes offerings from the likes of Amazon, Google, and Microsoft.

You’ll get hands-on practical experience of writing and deploying Kubernetes applications, configuring and operating Kubernetes clusters, and automating cloud infrastructure and deployments with tools such as Helm. You’ll learn about Kubernetes support for security, authentication, and permissions, including Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), and best practices for securing containers and Kubernetes in production.

You’ll learn how to set up continuous integration and deployment with Kubernetes, how to back up and restore data, how to test your cluster for conformance and reliability, how to monitor, trace, log, and aggregate metrics, and how to make your Kubernetes infrastructure scalable, resilient, and cost-effective.

To illustrate all the things we talk about, we apply them to a very simple demo application. You can follow along with all our examples using the code from our Git repo.

Who Is This Book For?

This book is most directly relevant to IT operations staff responsible for servers, applications, and services, and developers responsible for either building new cloud native services, or migrating existing applications to Kubernetes and cloud. We assume no prior knowledge of Kubernetes or containers—don’t worry, we’ll walk you through all that.

Experienced Kubernetes users should still find much valuable material in the book: it covers advanced topics such as RBAC, continuous deployment, secrets management, and observability. Whatever your level of expertise, we hope you’ll find something useful in these pages.

What Questions Does This Book Answer?

In planning and writing this book, we spoke to hundreds of people about cloud native and Kubernetes, ranging from industry leaders and experts to complete beginners. Here are some of the questions they said they wanted a book like this to answer:

• “I’d like to learn why I should invest my time in this technology. What problems will it help to solve for me and my team?”

• “Kubernetes seems great, but it’s quite a steep learning curve. Setting up a quick demo is easy, but operating and troubleshooting it seems daunting. We’d like some solid guidance on how people are running Kubernetes clusters in the real world, and what problems we’re likely to encounter.”

• “Opinionated advice would be useful. The Kubernetes ecosystem has too many options for beginning teams to choose between. When there are multiple ways of doing the same thing, which one is best? How do we choose?”

And perhaps the most important question of all:

• “How do I use Kubernetes without breaking my company?”

We kept these questions, and many others, firmly in mind while writing this book, and we’ve done our level best to answer them. How did we do? Turn the page to find out.

Conventions Used in This Book

The following typographical conventions are used in this book:

Italic

Indicates new terms, URLs, email addresses, filenames, and file extensions.

Constant width

Used for program listings, as well as within paragraphs to refer to program elements such as variable or function names, databases, data types, environment variables, statements, and keywords.

Constant width bold

Shows commands or other text that should be typed literally by the user.

Constant width italic

Shows text that should be replaced with user-supplied values or by values determined by context.

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