Welcome

Thank you for purchasing the MEAP for Kubernetes in Action 2nd Edition.

As part of my work at Red Hat, I started using Kubernetes in 2014, even before version 1.0 was released. Those were interesting times. Not many people working in the software industry knew about Kubernetes, and there was no real community yet. There were hardly any blog posts about it and the documentation was still very basic. Kubernetes itself was ridden with bugs. When you combine all these facts, you can imagine that working with Kubernetes was extremely difficult.

In 2015 I was asked by Manning to write the first edition of this book. The originally planned 300-page book grew to over 600 pages full of information. The writing forced me to also research those parts of Kubernetes that I wouldn’t have looked at more closely otherwise. I put most of what I learned into the book. Judging by their reviews and comments, readers love a detailed book like this.

The plan for the second edition of the book is to add even more information and to rearrange some of the existing content. The exercises in this book will take you from deploying a trivial application that initially uses only the basic features of Kubernetes to a full-fledged application that incorporates additional features as the book introduces them.

The book is divided into five parts. In the first part, after the introduction of Kubernetes and containers, you’ll deploy the application in the simplest way. In the second part you’ll learn the main concepts used to describe and deploy your application. After that you’ll explore the inner workings of Kubernetes components. This will give you a good foundation to learn the difficult part - how to manage Kubernetes in production. In the last part of the book you’ll learn about best practices and how to extend Kubernetes.

I hope you all like this second edition even better than the first, and if you’re reading the book for the first time, your feedback will be even more valuable. If any part of the book is difficult to understand, please post your questions, comments or suggestions in the liveBook forum.

Thank you for helping me write the best book possible.

—Marko Lukša