It's getting more common to find yourself responsible for running the code you've written as well as developing the features. While many companies still have an operations group (generally retitled to SRE or DevOps) that help with expert knowledge, developers (like you) are often being asked to expand your knowledge and responsibility scope.
There's been a shift to treating infrastructure-like code for some time. Several years ago, I might have described the boundary as Puppet is used by operations folks and Chef is used by developers. All of that changed with the advent and growth first of clouds in general, and more recently with the growth of Docker. Containers provide a level of control and isolation, as well as development flexibility, that is very appealing. When using containers, you quickly move to where you want to use more than one container a time, for isolation of responsibility as well as horizontal scaling.
Kubernetes is a project open sourced from Google, now hosted by the cloud-native computing foundation. It exposes many of the lessons from Google's experience of running software in containers and makes it available to you. It encompasses not only running containers, but grouping them together into services, scaling them horizontally, as well as providing means to control how these containers interact together and how they get exposed to the outside world.
Kubernetes provides a declarative structure backed with an API and command-line tools. Kubernetes can be used on your laptop, or leveraged from one of the many cloud providers. The benefit of using Kubernetes is being able to use the same set of tools with the same expectations, regardless of running it locally, in a small lab at your company, or in any number of larger cloud providers. It's not exactly the write once, run anywhere promise of Java from days gone by; more we'll give you a consistent set of tools, regardless of running on your laptop, your company's datacenter, or a cloud provider such as AWS, Azure, or Google.
This book is your guide to leveraging Kubernetes and its capabilities for developing, validating, and running your code.
This book focuses on examples and samples that take you through how to use Kubernetes and integrate it into your development workflow. Through the examples, we focus on common tasks that you may want to use to take advantage of running your code with Kubernetes.
