Managing Kubernetes

Preface

Who should read This Book

This book is aimed at operators of Kubernetes clusters, either on-premise or in the cloud, or anyone who wants to gain a deeper knowledge of how Kubernetes is architected, installed and maintained. Although there is useful information in this book if you are a Kubernetes user or developer, ultimately this book is lower level than most Kubernetes users will need. Instead it is devoted to the details that concern the people who are responsible for ensuring that a cluster stays healthy, secure and available for developers building applications on Kubernetes.

Why we wrote This Book

While there is an increasingly large body of work both online and in printed form describing how users might best take advantage of Kubernetes to build and deploy their applications, there is relatively little content available for the operators who install, maintain and upgrade Kubernetes clusters. This book steps into that gap and provides a concise collection of the information necessary to successfully operate Kubernetes for yourself or for others.

Kubernetes is ubiquitous today as the most common way people manage containers and build cloud native applications. Indeed Kubernetes as a service is available in all of the major public clouds. But for many people using such a service isn’t appealing. Perhaps you have regulatory reasons for preserving data in an on-premise environment like a hospital or financial institution, or perhaps you are operating Kubernetes in a location like a distant airfield or oil platform where limited bandwidth makes using the cloud impossible. Alternately you may simply be interested in gaining the skills needed to run Kubernetes in such an environment.

We hope that the knowledge we have gained through our various experiences operating Kubernetes can be shared through this book. With luck this book will provide you the advantage of our experiences without requiring that you go through the trials and tribulations by which this experience was obtained.

Navigating This Book

This book both summarizes how Kubernetes operates and dives deeply into topics necessary for successfully administering a Kubernetes cluster. After an introduction to the various topics in Chapter 1, Chapters 2 through 5 are devoted to describing the details of the Kubernetes architecture and components. These chapters provide an overview of the various components of Kubernetes and how they come together to implement the Kubernetes API. Additionally, details of how Kubernetes API requests are handled and processed are provided in Chapter 4, while Chapter 5 is devoted to how pods are scheduled into the cluster. A depth of understand of how Kubernetes operates will enable you to better serve your users who will need your help when things go wrong.

The remainder of the book is devoted to specific topics that are required to manage a Kubernetes cluster, including installing and upgrading Kubernetes (Chapter 6) User management, authentication and authorization (Chapters 7–8), admission control (Chapter 9), Kubernetes networking (Chapter 10) and monitoring and disaster recovery (Chapters 11–12). Chapter 13 is devoted to the various ways that the Kubernetes cluster can be extended.

Conventions Used in This Book

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Constant width bold

Shows commands or other text that should be typed literally by the user.

Constant width italic

Shows text that should be replaced with user-supplied values or by values determined by context.

Tip

This element signifies a tip or suggestion.

Note

This element signifies a general note.

Warning

This element indicates a warning or caution.

Using Code Examples

Supplemental material (code examples, exercises, etc.) is available for download at https://github.com/managing-kubernetes/managing-kubernetes.

This book is here to help you get your job done. In general, if example code is offered with this book, you may use it in your programs and documentation. You do not need to contact us for permission unless you’re reproducing a significant portion of the code. For example, writing a program that uses several chunks of code from this book does not require permission. Selling or distributing a CD-ROM of examples from O’Reilly books does require permission. Answering a question by citing this book and quoting example code does not require permission. Incorporating a significant amount of example code from this book into your product’s documentation does require permission.

We appreciate, but do not require, attribution. An attribution usually includes the title, author, publisher, and ISBN. For example: “Managing Kubernetes by Brendan Burns and Craig Tracey (O’Reilly). Copyright 2019 Brendan Burns and Craig Tracey, 978-1-492-03391-2.”

If you feel your use of code examples falls outside fair use or the permission given above, feel free to contact us at [e-mail].

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Acknowledgments

Brendan would like thank his wonderful family, Robin, Julia, and Ethan for love and support of everything he does. And the Kubernetes community, without whom none of this would be possible.

Craig thanks his family, and especially his wife, who have always supported all of his crazy dreams.

We would both like to thank Scott Collier, Lacie Evenson, Sebastien Goasguen, Erik St. Martin, Jérôme Petazzoni, Ben Straub, and Jason Yee for their feedback on early versions of the manuscript. Thanks also to Nikki McDonald and Virginia Wilson for their work in developing the manuscript and helping us bring all of our ideas together, and to Justin Billing, Shannon Wright, and Chris Edwards for their attention to the finishing touches.