If you are reading this book, you already made your decision to take your Kubernetes infrastructure to an advanced level, which means you are beyond the stage of evaluating the technology. To build production infrastructure, the investment remains a burden and it still needs a solid justification to the business and the leadership within your organization. We will try to be very specific in this section about why we need a reliable Kubernetes infrastructure, and to clarify the challenges you should expect in production.

Kubernetes adoption is exploding across organizations all over the world, and we expect this growth to continue to increase, as the International Data Corporation (IDC) predicts that around 95 percent of new microservices will be deployed in containers by 2021. Most companies find that containers and Kubernetes help to optimize costs, simplify deployment and operations, and decrease time to market, as well as play a pivotal...

Kubernetes could be easy to install, but it is complex to operate and maintain. Kubernetes in production brings challenges and difficulties along the way, from scaling, uptime, and security, to resilience, observability, resources utilization, and cost management. Kubernetes has succeeded in solving container management and orchestration, and it created a standard layer above the compute services. However, Kubernetes still lacks proper or complete support for some essential services, such as Identity and Access Management (IAM), storage, and image registries.

Usually, a Kubernetes cluster belongs to a bigger company's production infrastructure, which includes databases, IAM, Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), messaging, streaming, and others. Bringing a Kubernetes cluster to production requires connecting it to these external infrastructure parts.

Even during cloud transformation projects, we expect Kubernetes to manage...

"Your offering is production-ready when it exceeds customer expectations in a way that allows for business growth."

– Carter Morgan, Developer Advocate, Google

Production-readiness is the goal we need to achieve throughout this book, and we may not have a definitive definition for this buzzword. It could mean a cluster capable to serve production workloads and real traffic in a reliable and secure fashion. We can further extend this definition, but what many experts agree on is that there is a minimum set of requirements that you need to fulfill before you mark your cluster as production-ready.

We have gathered and categorized these readiness requirements according to the typical Kubernetes production layers (illustrated in the following diagram). We understand that there are still different production use cases for each organization, and product growth and business objectives...

We have learned about the basics of Kubernetes infrastructure and have got a high-level understanding of the production readiness characteristics of the Kubernetes clusters. Now, you are ready to go through the infrastructure best practices and design principles that will lead you through the way building and operating your production clusters.

The 12 principles of infrastructure design and management

Building a resilient and reliable Kubernetes infrastructure requires more than just getting your cluster up and running with a provisioning tool. Solid infrastructure design is a sequence of architecture decisions and their implementation. Luckily, many organizations and experts put these principles and architectural decisions into real tests.

The following list summarizes the core principles that may lead the decision-maker through the Kubernetes infrastructure design process, and throughout this book, you will learn about these principles...

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) defines cloud-native as scalable applications running in modern dynamic environments that use technologies such as containers, microservices, and declarative APIs. Kubernetes is the first CNCF project, and it is the world's most popular container orchestration platform.

Cloud-native computing uses an open source and modern commercial third-party software stack to build, package, and deploy applications as microservices. Containers and container orchestrators such as Kubernetes are key elements in the cloud-native approach, and both are enabling achieving a cloud-native state and satisfying the 12-factor app methodology requirements. These techniques enable resource utilization, distributed system reliability, scaling, and observability, among others.

The 12-factor app methodology

The 12-factor app methodology defines the characteristics and design aspects for developers and DevOps engineers building and...

Building a production-grade and reliable Kubernetes infrastructure and clusters is more than just provisioning a cluster and deploying applications to it. It is a continuous journey that combines infrastructure and services planning, design, implementation, CI/CD, operations, and maintenance.

Every aspect comes with its own set of technical decisions to make, best practices to follow, and challenges to overcome.

By now, you have a brief understanding of Kubernetes infrastructure basics, production challenges, and readiness features. Finally, we looked at the industry best practices for building and managing successful Kubernetes productions and learned about the cloud-native approach.

In the next chapter, we will learn the practical details of how to design and architect a successful Kubernetes cluster and the related infrastructure, while exploring the technical and architectural decisions, choices, and alternatives that you need to handle when rolling out your production...

You can refer to the following book if you are unfamiliar with basic Kubernetes concepts:

Getting Started with Kubernetes – Third Edition: https://www.packtpub.com/virtualization-and-cloud/getting-started-kubernetes-third-edition