In this practical guide, four Kubernetes professionals with deep experience in distributed systems, enterprise application development, and open source will guide you through the process of building applications with this container orchestration system. They distill decades of experience from companies that are successfully running Kubernetes in production and provide concrete code examples to back the methods presented in this book.

Revised to cover all the latest Kubernetes features, new tooling, and deprecations, this book is ideal for those who are familiar with basic Kubernetes concepts but want to get up to speed on the latest best practices. You'll learn exactly what you need to know to build your best app with Kubernetes the first time.

• Set up and develop applications in Kubernetes
• Learn patterns for monitoring, securing your systems, and managing upgrades, rollouts, and rollbacks
• Integrate services and legacy applications and develop higher-level platforms on top of Kubernetes
• Run machine learning workloads in Kubernetes
• Ensure pod and container security
• Understand issues that have become increasingly critical to the successful implementation of Kubernetes, such as chaos engineering/testing, GitOps, service mesh, and observability

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. Setting Up a Basic Service

Chapter 2. Developer Workflows

Chapter 3. Monitoring and Logging in Kubernetes

Chapter 4. Configuration, Secrets, and RBAC

Chapter 5. Continuous Integration, Testing, and Deployment

Chapter 6. Versioning, Releases, and Rollouts

Chapter 7. Worldwide Application Distribution and Staging

Chapter 8. Resource Management

Chapter 9. Networking, Network Security, and Service Mesh

Chapter 10. Pod and Container Security

Chapter 11. Policy and Governance for Your Cluster

Chapter 12. Managing Multiple Clusters

Chapter 13. Integrating External Services with Kubernetes

Chapter 14. Running Machine Learning in Kubernetes

Chapter 15. Building Higher-Level Application Patterns on Top of Kubernetes

Chapter 16. Managing State and Stateful Applications

Chapter 17. Admission Control and Authorization

Chapter 18. GitOps and Deployment

Chapter 19. Security

Chapter 20. Chaos Testing, Load Testing and Experiments

Chapter 21. Implementing an Operator

Chapter 22. Conclusion

From the Preface

Between the four of us, we have significant experience helping a wide variety of users deploy their applications onto Kubernetes. Through this experience, we have seen where people struggle, and we have helped them find their way to success. When sitting down to write this book, we attempted to capture these experiences so that many more people could learn by reading the lessons that we learned from these real-world experiences. It’s our hope that by committing our experiences to writing, we can scale our knowledge and allow you to be successful deploying and managing your application on Kubernetes on your own.

Who Should Read This Book

Kubernetes is the de facto standard for cloud native development. It is a powerful tool that can make your next application easier to develop, faster to deploy, and more reliable to operate. However, unlocking the power of Kubernetes requires using it correctly. This book is intended for anyone who is deploying real-world applications to Kubernetes and is interested in learning patterns and practices they can apply to the applications that they build on top of Kubernetes.

Importantly, this book is not an introduction to Kubernetes. We assume that you have a basic familiarity with the Kubernetes API and tools, and that you know how to create and interact with a Kubernetes cluster. If you are looking to learn Kubernetes, there are numerous great resources out there, such as Kubernetes: Up and Running (O’Reilly), that can give you an introduction.

Instead, this book is a resource for anyone who wants to dive deep on how to deploy specific applications and workloads on Kubernetes. It should be useful to you whether you are about to deploy your first application onto Kubernetes or you’ve been using Kubernetes for years.

About the Author

Brendan Burns is a Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft Azure and co-founder of the Kubernetes open source project. He has been building cloud applications for more than a decade.

Eddie Villalba is the Engineering Manager and Application Platform Practice Lead for North America at Google Cloud. He leads a team of engineers that focus on helping customers build Container optimized platforms for scalable, reliable distributed applications.

Dave Strebel is a Prinicipal Cloud Native Architect focusing on Open Source Cloud and Kubernetes. He is also deeply involved in the Kubernetes open source project helping with the Kubernetes release team and leading SIG-Azure.

Lachlan Evenson is a principal program manager in on the Microsoft Azure cloud native ecosytem. He has helped numerous people onboard to Kubernetes through both hands-on teaching and conference talks.