Preface

This book is a practical introduction to creating applications using containers. Readers will learn what containers are and why they are a new application deployment standard. We will start the journey with key concepts about containers, their features and usage, and how they will help us secure and speed up an application’s life cycle. You will also learn how to create secure container images for your applications and how to share and run them in different development stages and production.

The book is divided into different parts to help you use the software container technology. First, you will learn how to use a host environment to build and run your applications using multiple components, and then you will learn how to run them when distributed in complex container orchestrators.

This book focuses on the Kubernetes container orchestrator because of its unique features and popularity. You will learn how to use different Kubernetes resources to securely accomplish different application architecture models. You will also find different software options in this book that will help you create and test your applications on your desktop, using fully functional Kubernetes-packaged platforms. We will teach you how to use these Kubernetes desktop environments to prepare your applications, using the best security practices to deliver them on any Kubernetes platform. We will cover important topics such as data management (configurations, sensitive data, and application data), different mechanisms to publish applications, and application observability (monitoring, logging, and traceability).

Finally, we will show you how to automate the building, testing, and delivery of your applications, creating continuous integration and continuous delivery workflows that run within Kubernetes clusters.