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)

Understanding the challenges with stateful applications

Kubernetes was initially built for stateless applications in order to keep containers portable. Even when we run stateful applications, the applications themselves are actually very often stateless containers where the state is stored separately and mounted from a resource called Persistent Volume (PV). We will learn the different resource types used to maintain state and also keep some form of flexibility later in the Understanding storage primitives in Kubernetes section.

I would like to highlight the six notable stateful application challenges that we will try to address in this chapter:

  • Deployment challenges: Especially when running a mission-critical service in production, finding the ideal deployment method of a certain stateful application can be challenging to start with. Should we use a YAML file we found in a blog article, open source repository examples, Helm charts, or an operator? Your choice will have...