In this book, we will help you build, scale, and manage production-ready Kubernetes clusters. Each section of this book will empower you with the core container concepts and the operational context of running modern web services that need to be available 24 hours of the day, 7 days a week, 365 days of the year. As we progress, you'll be given concrete, code-based examples that you can deploy into running clusters in order to get real-world feedback on Kubernetes' many abstractions. By the end of this book, you will have mastered the core conceptual building blocks of Kubernetes, and will have a firm understanding of how to handle the following paradigms:

• Orchestration
• Scheduling
• Networking
• Security
• Storage
• Identity and authentication
• Infrastructure management

This chapter will set the stage for why Kubernetes? and give an overview of modern container history, diving into how containers work, as well as why it's important to schedule, orchestrate, and manage a container platform well. We'll tie this back to concrete objectives and goals for your business and product. This chapter will also give a brief overview of how Kubernetes orchestration can enhance our container management strategy and how we can get a basic Kubernetes cluster up, running, and ready for container deployments.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Introducing container operations and management
• The importance of container management 
• The advantages of Kubernetes

• Downloading the latest Kubernetes
• Installing and starting up a new Kubernetes cluster
• The components of a Kubernetes cluster