Book Image

Kubernetes in Production Best Practices

By : Aly Saleh, Murat Karslioglu
Book Image

Kubernetes in Production Best Practices

By: Aly Saleh, Murat Karslioglu

Overview of this book

Although out-of-the-box solutions can help you to get a cluster up and running quickly, running a Kubernetes cluster that is optimized for production workloads is a challenge, especially for users with basic or intermediate knowledge. With detailed coverage of cloud industry standards and best practices for achieving scalability, availability, operational excellence, and cost optimization, this Kubernetes book is a blueprint for managing applications and services in production. You'll discover the most common way to deploy and operate Kubernetes clusters, which is to use a public cloud-managed service from AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud Platform (GCP). This book explores Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), the AWS-managed version of Kubernetes, for working through practical exercises. As you get to grips with implementation details specific to AWS and EKS, you'll understand the design concepts, implementation best practices, and configuration applicable to other cloud-managed services. Throughout the book, you’ll also discover standard and cloud-agnostic tools, such as Terraform and Ansible, for provisioning and configuring infrastructure. By the end of this book, you’ll be able to leverage Kubernetes to operate and manage your production environments confidently.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Learning about cluster maintenance and upgrades

In this section, we will learn about upgrading our Kubernetes clusters in production. Generally, a new major Kubernetes version is announced quarterly, and every minor version is supported around 12 months after its initial release date. Following the rule of thumb for software upgrades, it is not common to upgrade to a new version immediately after its release unless it is a severe time-sensitive security patch. Cloud providers also follow the same practice and run their conformance tests before releasing a new image to the public. Therefore, cloud providers' Kubernetes releases usually follow a couple of versions behind the upstream release of Kubernetes. If you'd like to read about the latest releases, you can find the Kubernetes release notes on the official Kubernetes documentation site at https://kubernetes.io/docs/setup/release/notes/.

In Chapter 3, Provisioning Kubernetes Clusters Using AWS and Terraform, we learned...