Preface
The idea for this book was born when one of my customers wanted to implement a minimal container orchestration engine for their apps on their resource-constrained edge device. Deploying the entirety of Kubernetes was not the solution, but then I encountered the realm of minimal Kubernetes distributions, and after much experimentation with several providers, I chose MicroK8s to successfully build various edge computing use cases and scenarios for them.
Canonical’s MicroK8s Kubernetes distribution is small, lightweight, and fully conformant. It’s a minimalistic distribution with a focus on performance and simplicity. MicroK8s can be easily deployed in IoT and edge devices due to its small footprint. By the end of this book, you will know how to effectively implement the following use cases and scenarios for edge computing using MicroK8s:
- Getting your Kubernetes cluster up and running
- Enabling core Kubernetes add-ons such as Domain Name System (DNS) and dashboards
- Creating, scaling, and performing rolling updates on multi-node Kubernetes clusters
- Working with various container networking options, such as Calico, Flannel, and Cilium
- Setting up MetalLB and Ingress options for load balancing
- Using OpenEBS storage replication for stateful application
- Configuring Kubeflow and running AI/ML use cases
- Configuring service mesh integration with Istio and Linkerd
- Running serverless applications using Knative and OpenFaaS
- Configuring logging and monitoring options (Prometheus, Grafana, Elastic, Fluentd, and Kibana)
- Configuring a multi-node, highly available Kubernetes cluster
- Configuring Kata for secured containers
- Configuring strict confinement for running in isolation
According to Canonical’s 2022 Kubernetes and cloud native operations report (https://juju.is/cloud-native-kubernetes-usage-report-2022), 48 percent of respondents indicated the biggest barriers to migrating to or using Kubernetes and containers are a lack of in-house capabilities and limited staff.
As indicated in the report, there is a skills deficit as well as a knowledge gap, which I believe this book will solve by covering crucial areas that are required to bring you up to speed in no time.
