We took a very brief look at how containers work and how they lend themselves to the new architecture patterns in microservices. You should now have a better understanding of how these two forces will require a variety of operations and management tasks, and how Kubernetes offers strong features to address these challenges. We created two different clusters on both GCE and AWS, and explored the startup script as well as some of the built-in features of Kubernetes. Finally, we looked at the alternatives to the kube-up script in kops, and tried our hand at manual cluster configuration with the kubeadm tool on AWS with Ubuntu 16.04.

In the next chapter, we will explore the core concept and abstractions K8s provides to manage containers and full application stacks. We will also look at basic scheduling, service discovery, and health checking.