Are you looking to learn more about Kubernetes and don’t know which resources to use? You can start by reading the book Kubernetes: Up and Running: Dive Into the Future of Infrastructure by Brendan Burns, Joe Beda & Kelsey Hightower.

The book is organized in 18 chapters. It starts with an introduction to the value of immutability and declarative configuration and explains how self-healing systems work.

Next, the reader is introduced to containers, what they are and how they work. The authors used Docker as the Runtime environment. They explained how the containers are created and how to build application images with Docker.

After understanding how the containers work and the advantage of using them, the authors explain how to deploy a Kubernetes cluster and present the possibilities that you have for running a Kubernetes cluster, starting from installing it on local machine, in a Docker container or by deploying it in the Public Cloud like AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Platform.

Next, the reader is introduced to the common kubectl commands which are used for interacting with the Kubernetes API.

Starting from chapter 5, the authors start to present the different Kubernetes manifests: Pods, Services, Ingress Controllers, ReplicaSets, Deployments, DaemonSets, Jobs and CronJobs and, of course, ConfigMaps and Secrets.

In the last part of the book, we are introduced to Role-Based Access Control (a security feature), how to integrate Kubernetes with external Storage Solutions and how to extend the Kubernetes API with Custom Resources.

The last two chapters explain how to deploy a real-world application. The authors present 4 real-world applications: Jupiter (an open source scientific notebook), Parse (an open source API server for mobile applications), Ghost (a blogging and content management platform) and Redis (a lightweight, performant key/value store). They end the book by sharing some principles to guide us in the process of deploying a new application.

What I liked about this book is that the concepts are explained very well. The book has a lot of examples and you may follow along in your environment. This provides you with the opportunity to better understand how Kubernetes works and helps you discover how different resources integrate with each other.

Did I stir your interest? You can find the book here: Kubernetes: Up and Running: Dive Into the Future of Infrastructure.

Did you enjoy reading the book?