What this book covers

Chapter 1, Docker and Container Essentials, covers the problems Docker and Kubernetes address for developers. You will be introduced to Docker, including the Docker daemon, data, installation, and using the Docker CLI.

Chapter 2, Deploying Kubernetes Using KinD, covers KinD, a powerful tool that allows you to create a Kubernetes cluster ranging from a single node cluster to a full multi-node cluster. The chapter goes beyond a basic KinD cluster, explaining how to use a load-balancer running HAProxy to load-balance worker nodes. By the end of this chapter, you will understand how KinD works and how to create a custom multi-node cluster, which will be used for the exercises in the chapters.

Chapter 3, Kubernetes Bootcamp, provides a refresher on Kubernetes, and if you are new to Kubernetes, this chapter will cover most of the objects that a cluster includes. It will explain each object with a description of what each object does and its function in a cluster. It is meant to be a refresher, or a "pocket guide" to objects. It does not contain exhaustive details for each object (that would require a second book).

Chapter 4, Services, Load Balancing, ExternalDNS, and Global Balancing, explains how to expose a Kubernetes deployment using services. Each service type will be explained with examples, and you will learn how to expose them using both a layer 7 and layer 4 load balancer. In this chapter, you will go beyond the basics of a simple Ingress controller, installing MetalLB, to provide layer 4 access to services. You will also learn about two add-ons that benefit Enterprise clusters by install an incubator project called external-dns to provide dynamic name resolution for the services exposed by MetalLB and K8GB, which provides native Kubernetes Global Load Balancing.

Chapter 5, Integrating Authentication into Your Cluster, answers the question "once your cluster is built, how will users access it?" In this chapter we'll detail how OpenID Connect works and why you should use it to access your cluster. You'll also learn how to authenticate your pipelines, and finally we'll also cover several anti-patterns that should be avoided and explain why they should be avoided.

Chapter 6, RBAC Policies and Auditing, explains that once users have access to a cluster, you need to know how to limit their access. Whether you are providing an entire cluster to your users or just a namespace, you'll need to know how Kubernetes authorizes access via its role-based access control (RBAC) system. In this chapter, we'll detail how to design RBAC policies, how to debug them, and different strategies for multi-tenancy.

Chapter 7, Deploying a Secured Kubernetes Dashboard, covers the Kubernetes Dashboard, which is often the first thing users try to launch once a cluster is up and running. There's quite a bit of mythology around the security (or lack thereof).

Your cluster will be made of other web applications too, such as network dashboards, logging systems, and monitoring dashboards. This chapter looks at how the dashboard is architected, how to properly secure it, and examples of how not to deploy it with details as to why.

Chapter 8, Extending Security Using Open Policy Agent, provides you the guidance you need to deploy the OpenPolicyAgent and GateKeeper to enable policies that can't be implemented using RBAC. We'll cover how to deploy GateKeeper, how to write policies in Rego, and how to test your policies using OPA's built-in testing framework.

Chapter 9, Node Security with GateKeeper, deals with the security of the nodes that run your Pods. We will discuss how to securely design your containers so they are harder to abuse and how build policies using GateKeeper that constrain your containers from accessing resources they don't need.

Chapter 10, Auditing Using Falco, DevOps AI, and ECK, explains that Kubernetes includes event logging for API access, but it doesn't have the ability to capture container runtime events. To address this limitation, we will install a project that was donated to the CNCF by Sysdig called Falco. Using Falco, you will learn how to trigger actions based on events captured by Falco using Kubeless functions, and how to present the data that is captured by Falco using FalcoSideKick to forward events to the FalcoSidekick-UI and the ECK stack (Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes).

Chapter 11, Backing Up Workloads, explains how to create a backup of your cluster workloads for disaster recovery, or cluster migrations, using Velero. You will go hands-on to create an S3-compatible storage location using MinIO to create a backup of example workloads and restore the backup to a brand new cluster to simulate a cluster migration.

Chapter 12, An Introduction to Istio, explains that many enterprises use a service mesh to provide advanced features such as security, traffic routing, authentication, tracing, and observability to a cluster. This chapter will introduce you to Istio, a popular open-source mesh, and its architecture, along with the most commonly used resources provided it provides. You will deploy Istio to your KinD cluster with an example application and learn how to observe the behavior of an application using an observability tool called Kiali.

Chapter 13, Building and Deploying Applications on Istio, acknowledges that once you've deployed Istio, you'll want to develop and deploy applications that use it! This chapter starts with a walk-through of the differences between monoliths and micro-services and how they're deployed. Next, we'll step through building a micro-service to run in Istio and get into advanced topics like authentication, authorization, and service-to-service authentication for your services. You will also learn how to secure Kiali access by leveraging existing roles in Kubernetes using an OIDC provider and JSON Web Tokens.

Chapter 14, Provisioning a Platform, discusses how to build a platform for automating a multi-tenant cluster with GitLab, Tekton, ArgoCD, GateKeeper, and OpenUnison. We'll explore how to build pipelines and how to automate their creation. We'll explore how the objects that are used to drive pipelines are related to each other, how to build relationships between systems, and finally, how to create a self-service workflow for automating the deployment of pipelines.