Book Image

Cloud Native with Kubernetes

By : Alexander Raul
Book Image

Cloud Native with Kubernetes

By: Alexander Raul

Overview of this book

Kubernetes is a modern cloud native container orchestration tool and one of the most popular open source projects worldwide. In addition to the technology being powerful and highly flexible, Kubernetes engineers are in high demand across the industry. This book is a comprehensive guide to deploying, securing, and operating modern cloud native applications on Kubernetes. From the fundamentals to Kubernetes best practices, the book covers essential aspects of configuring applications. You’ll even explore real-world techniques for running clusters in production, tips for setting up observability for cluster resources, and valuable troubleshooting techniques. Finally, you’ll learn how to extend and customize Kubernetes, as well as gaining tips for deploying service meshes, serverless tooling, and more on your cluster. By the end of this Kubernetes book, you’ll be equipped with the tools you need to confidently run and extend modern applications on Kubernetes.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
1
Section 1: Setting Up Kubernetes
5
Section 2: Configuring and Deploying Applications on Kubernetes
11
Section 3: Running Kubernetes in Production
16
Section 4: Extending Kubernetes

Configuring containerized applications using best practices

By now, we know how to effectively deploy (as covered in Chapter 4, Scaling and Deploying Your Application) and expose (as covered in Chapter 5, Services and Ingress Communicating with the outside world) containerized applications on Kubernetes. This is enough to run non-trivial stateless containerized applications on Kubernetes. However, Kubernetes also provides additional tooling for application configuration and Secrets management.

Since Kubernetes runs containers, you could always configure your application to use environment variables baked into your Dockerfile. But this sidesteps some of the real value of an orchestrator like Kubernetes. We want to be able to change our application container without rebuilding a Docker image. For this purpose, Kubernetes gives us two configuration-focused resources: ConfigMaps and Secrets. Let's first look at ConfigMaps.

Understanding ConfigMaps

When running applications...