Kubernetes [8] is an open source platform for managing containerized workloads that was built from the start with future extensibility in mind. It was originally released by Google back in 2014 and it encompasses both their insights and best practices for running large-scale, production-grade applications. Nowadays, it has eclipsed the managed container offerings of the most popular cloud providers and is en route to becoming the de facto standard for deploying applications on-premises and in the cloud.
Describing Kubernetes in detail is not within the scope of this book. Instead, the goal of the following sections is to provide you with a brief introduction to Kubernetes and distill some of its basic concepts into an easily digestible format that conveys enough information to allow you to spin up a test cluster and deploy the Links 'R...