Preface

Containers have allowed a real leap forward since their massive adoption in the world of virtualization because they have allowed greater flexibility, especially these days, when buzzwords such as cloud, agile, and DevOps are on everyone’s lips.

Today, almost no one questions the use of containers—they’re basically everywhere, especially after the success of Docker and the rise of Kubernetes as the leading platform for container orchestration.

Containers have brought tremendous flexibility to organizations, but they have remained questionable for a very long time when organizations face the challenge of deploying them in production. For years, companies have been using containers for proof-of-concept projects, local development, and similar purposes, but the idea of using containers for real production workloads was inconceivable for many organizations.

Container orchestrators were the game-changer, with Kubernetes in the lead. Originally built by Google, today, Kubernetes is the leading container orchestrator that provides you with all the features you need in order to deploy containers in production at scale. Kubernetes is popular, but it is also complex. This tool is so versatile that getting started with it and progressing to advanced usage is not an easy task: it is not an easy tool to learn and operate.

As an orchestrator, Kubernetes has its own concepts independent of those of a container engine. But when both container engines and orchestrators are used together, you get a very strong platform ready to deploy your cloud-native applications in production. As engineers working with Kubernetes daily, we were convinced, like many, that it was a technology to master, and we decided to share our knowledge in order to make Kubernetes accessible by covering most of this orchestrator.

This book is entirely dedicated to Kubernetes and is the result of our work. It provides a broad view of Kubernetes and covers a lot of aspects of the orchestrator, from pure container Pod creation to deploying the orchestrator on the public cloud. We didn’t want this book to be a Getting Started guide.

We hope this book will teach you everything you want to learn about Kubernetes!