Preface

Kubernetes is an open source container orchestration platform originally developed by Google and made available to the public in 2014. The popularity of Kubernetes helped to make the deployment of container-based, complex, distributed systems simpler to manage for developers. Since its inception, the community has built a large ecosystem around Kubernetes, with many open source projects that have made the automation of management functions possible.

This book is specifically designed to quickly help Kubernetes administrators and site reliability engineers (SREs) to build and manage production-grade Kubernetes infrastructure following industry best practices and well-proven techniques learned from early technology adopters of large-scale Kubernetes deployments.

While we use Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) to deliver the practical exercises in this book, we believe that the explained Kubernetes design, provisioning, and configuration concepts and techniques remain valid for other cloud providers. Regarding the selection of provisioning and configuration tools, we decided to use cloud-agnostic tools such as Terraform and Ansible to ensure portability across cloud providers.

Kubernetes in Production Best Practices gives you the confidence to use Kubernetes to host your production workloads, having the comprehensive infrastructure design knowledge to build your clusters and a clear understanding of managing and operating them efficiently.

Who this book is for

This book is ideal for cloud infrastructure architects, SREs, DevOps engineers, system administrators, and engineering managers who have a basic knowledge of Kubernetes and are willing to apply cloud industry best practices to design, build, and operate production-grade Kubernetes clusters.

A basic knowledge of Kubernetes, AWS, Terraform, Ansible, and Bash will be beneficial.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Introduction to Kubernetes Infrastructure and Production-Readiness, teaches you about the basics of Kubernetes infrastructure, then explains the principles of infrastructure designing, and finally the characteristics of production-ready clusters.

Chapter 2, Architecting Production-Grade Kubernetes Infrastructure, teaches you about the various aspects, trade-offs, and best practices that you need to consider while designing Kubernetes infrastructure.

Chapter 3, Provisioning Kubernetes Clusters Using AWS and Terraform, teaches you how to use AWS, Terraform, and infrastructure as code techniques to provision Kubernetes infrastructure.

Chapter 4, Managing Cluster Configurations with Ansible, teaches you how to use Ansible to build a flexible and scalable configuration management solution for Kubernetes clusters.

Chapter 5, Configuring and Enhancing Kubernetes Networking Services, teaches you how to configure and improve Kubernetes cluster networking, and the essential Kubernetes networking add-ons to use.

Chapter 6, Securing Kubernetes Effectively, teaches you about Kubernetes security best practices, and how to validate and ensure the security of clusters.

Chapter 7, Managing Storage and Stateful Applications, teaches you how to overcome storage challenges in Kubernetes using the best storage management solution in the ecosystem.

Chapter 8, Deploying Seamless and Reliable Applications, teaches you container and image best practices, as well as application deployment strategies to achieve scalable service in production.

Chapter 9, Monitoring, Logging, and Observability, teaches you Kubernetes observability best practices, important metrics to watch for, as well as the monitoring and logging stacks available in the market, and when to use each of them.

Chapter 10, Operating and Maintaining Efficient Kubernetes Clusters, teaches you Kubernetes operation best practices, as well as cluster maintenance tasks such as upgrades and rotation, backups, and disaster recovery, and the solutions available to improve the quality of clusters.

To get the most out of this book

To use this book, you will need access to computers, servers, AWS, or other cloud provider services where you can provision virtual machine instances. To set up the lab environments, you may also need larger cloud instances that will require you to enable billing.

If you are using the digital version of this book, we advise you to type the code yourself or access the code via the GitHub repository (link available in the next section). Doing so will help you avoid any potential errors related to the copying and pasting of code.

Download the example code files

You can download the example code files for this book from GitHub at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Kubernetes-in-Production-Best-Practices. In case there's an update to the code, it will be updated on the existing GitHub repository.

We also have other code bundles from our rich catalog of books and videos available at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/. Check them out!

Code in Action

Code in Action videos for this book can be viewed at http://bit.ly/36JpElI.

Download the color images

We also provide a PDF file that has color images of the screenshots/diagrams used in this book. You can download it here: https://static.packt-cdn.com/downloads/9781800202450_ColorImages.pdf.

Conventions used

There are a number of text conventions used throughout this book.

Code in text: Indicates code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles. Here is an example: "As a best practice, we recommend that you limit any privileged pods within the kube-system namespace."

A block of code is set as follows:

terraform {
  required_version = "~> 0.12.24"
}

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

provider "aws" {
  region = var.aws_region
  version = "~> 2.52.0"
}

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

$ cd Chapter03/terraform/shared-state
$ terraform init

Bold: Indicates a new term, an important word, or words that you see on screen. For example, words in menus or dialog boxes appear in the text like this. Here is an example: "Select System info from the Administration panel."

Tips or important notes

Appear like this.

Get in touch

Feedback from our readers is always welcome.

General feedback: If you have questions about any aspect of this book, mention the book title in the subject of your message and email us at [e-mail].

Errata: Although we have taken every care to ensure the accuracy of our content, mistakes do happen. If you have found a mistake in this book, we would be grateful if you would report this to us. Please visit www.packtpub.com/support/errata, selecting your book, clicking on the Errata Submission Form link, and entering the details.

Piracy: If you come across any illegal copies of our works in any form on the internet, we would be grateful if you would provide us with the location address or website name. Please contact us at [e-mail] with a link to the material.

If you are interested in becoming an author: If there is a topic that you have expertise in and you are interested in either writing or contributing to a book, please visit authors.packtpub.com.

Reviews

Please leave a review. Once you have read and used this book, why not leave a review on the site that you purchased it from? Potential readers can then see and use your unbiased opinion to make purchase decisions, we at Packt can understand what you think about our products, and our authors can see your feedback on their book. Thank you!

For more information about Packt, please visit packt.com.