What this book covers

Chapter 1, Kubernetes in Today’s World, goes over, from a theoretical perspective, how you should think about Kubernetes in the current ecosystem – things such as why it’s important, what the whole idea of “cloud native” means, and what containerization as a whole is doing for engineers.

Chapter 2, Getting the Ball Rolling with Kubernetes and the Top Three Cloud Platforms, hits the ground running with cluster deployments. You’ll learn how to deploy Kubernetes clusters in Azure, AWS, and GCP. You’ll see from a UI/GUI perspective how to deploy the clusters with code. This chapter uses Terraform for Infrastructure as Code (IaC), as that’s currently the most popular method in production.

Chapter 3, Running Kubernetes with Other Cloud Pals, teaches you how to deploy the top three most popular managed Kubernetes services. However, that doesn’t mean those are the only methods. In this chapter, you’ll see a few more popular options that are used in production but are mostly used for testing production workloads, as they’re a bit cheaper from a cost perspective.

In today’s cloud-centric world, a lot of technical marketing and content that you see on social media doesn’t talk about on-prem. The reality is that on-prem, especially on-prem Kubernetes clusters, are still very much a thing. In Chapter 4, The On-Prem Kubernetes Reality Check, you’ll learn about how to think about on-prem from a theoretical perspective and a bit hands-on.

Chapter 5, Deploying Kubernetes Apps Like a True Cloud Native, starts your journey into deploying applications to the cloud. In the first few chapters, you learned about cluster management, which is drastically important but only one half of the puzzle. The second piece of the puzzle is actual Kubernetes resource deployment.

Starting off where you left off in the previous chapter, Chapter 6, Kubernetes Deployment – Same Game, Next Level, takes Kubernetes resource deployments to the next level. You’ll be introduced to concepts such as CI/CD, GitOps, and service mesh deployments. This is considered the “advanced” piece of Kubernetes resource deployments, which you’ll see a lot of in production.

Up until this point in the book, you’ve learned how to deploy and manage clusters and applications. Once clusters and apps are deployed, you then need to confirm that they’re running as expected. That’s where observability and monitoring come into play, which we will look at in Chapter 7, Kubernetes Monitoring and Observability.

To wrap up any Kubernetes production deployment, you need to think about one major element before any resource reaches production – security. Security is the make or break between a successful environment and a long weekend of putting out fires. In Chapter 8, Security Reality Check, you’ll learn the major components to secure a Kubernetes environment and a few key tools and platforms that you can use to make it happen.