What this book covers
Chapter 1, Understanding Docker and Containers Essentials, helps you learn what problems Docker and Kubernetes address for developers. You will be introduced to different aspects of Docker including the Docker daemon, data, installation, and using the Docker CLI.
Chapter 2, Working with Docker Data, discusses how containers need to store data, with some use cases only requiring ephemeral disks, while others require persistent disks. In this chapter, you will learn about persistent data and how Docker can be used with volumes, bind mounts, and tmpfs to store data.
Chapter 3, Understanding Docker Networking, introduces you to networking in Docker. It will cover creating different network types, adding and removing container networks, and exposing container services.
Chapter 4, Deploying Kubernetes Using KinD, shows how KinD is 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 following chapters.
Chapter 5, Kubernetes Bootcamp, covers most of the objects that a cluster includes, whether you need a refresher on Kubernetes, or are if you are newer to the platform. It explains the objects with a description of what each object does and its function in a cluster. This chapter is meant to be a refresher, or a "pocket guide" to objects – it does not contain exhaustive details for each object, as that would require a second book.
Chapter 6, Services, Load Balancing, and External-DNS, teaches you how to expose a Kubernetes deployment using services. Each service type is explained with examples, and you will learn how to expose them using both a Layer-7 and a 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 install an incubator project called external-dns to provide dynamic name resolution for the services exposed by MetalLB.
Chapter 7, Integrating Authentication into Your Cluster, considers the question of how users will access your cluster once it is built. In this chapter, we'll detail how OpenID Connect works and why you should use it for accessing your cluster. We'll also cover several anti-patterns that should be avoided and why they should be avoided.
Chapter 8, RBAC Policies and Auditing, demonstrates how, once users have access to a cluster, you need to be able 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 system, or RBAC. In this chapter, we'll detail how to design RBAC policies, how to debug them, and different strategies for multi-tenancy.
Chapter 9, Securing the Kubernetes Dashboard, looks at 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 too. 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 10, Creating Pod Security Policies, deals with the security of the nodes that run your Pod instances. We will discuss how to securely design your containers so they are harder to abuse and how to build policies to constrain your containers from accessing resources they don't need. We'll also cover the deprecation of the PodSecurityPolicy API and how to handle it.
Chapter 11, Extending Security using Open Policy Agent, provides you with the guidance you need to deploy OpenPolicyAgent and GateKeeper to enable policies that can't be implemented using RBAC or PodSecurityPolicies. 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 12, Auditing Using Falco and EFK, discusses how Kubernetes includes event logging for API access, but it doesn't have the ability to log events that may be executed inside a Pod. To address this limitation, we will install a project that was donated to the CNCF called Falco. You will also learn how to present the data that is captured by Falco using FalcoSideKick and the EFK stack (ElasticSearch, FluentD, and Kibana). You will get hands-on experience by looking for events in Kibana and creating a custom dashboard that contains important events.
Chapter 13, Backing Up Workloads, teaches you how to create a backup of your cluster workloads for disaster recovery, or cluster migrations, using Velero. You will go hands-on and create a backup of example workloads and restore the backup to a brand-new cluster to simulate a cluster migration.
Chapter 14, Provisioning a Platform, has you building a platform for automating a multi-tenant cluster with GitLab, Tekton, ArgoCD, 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.
