Marko Luksa - Kubernetes in Action

After working at Red Hat for a few years, in late 2014 I was assigned to a newly-established team called Cloud Enablement. Our task was to bring the companys range of middleware products to the OpenShift Container Platform, which was then being developed on top of Kubernetes. At that time, Kubernetes was still in its infancyversion 1.0 hadnt even been released yet.

Our team had to get to know the ins and outs of Kubernetes quickly to set a proper direction for our software and take advantage of everything Kubernetes had to offer. When faced with a problem, it was hard for us to tell if we were doing things wrong or merely hitting one of the early Kubernetes bugs.

Both Kubernetes and my understanding of it have come a long way since then. When I first started using it, most people hadnt even heard of Kubernetes. Now, virtually every software engineer knows about it, and it has become one of the fastest-growing and most-widely-adopted ways of running applications in both the cloud and on-premises datacenters.

In my first month of dealing with Kubernetes, I wrote a two-part blog post about how to run a JBoss WildFly application server cluster in OpenShift/Kubernetes. At the time, I never could have imagined that a simple blog post would ultimately lead the people at Manning to contact me about whether I would like to write a book about Kubernetes. Of course, I couldnt say no to such an offer, even though I was sure theyd approached other people as well and would ultimately pick someone else.

And yet, here we are. After more than a year and a half of writing and researching, the book is done. Its been an awesome journey. Writing a book about a technology is absolutely the best way to get to know it in much greater detail than youd learn as just a user. As my knowledge of Kubernetes has expanded during the process and Kubernetes itself has evolved, Ive constantly gone back to previous chapters Ive written and added additional information. Im a perfectionist, so Ill never really be absolutely satisfied with the book, but Im happy to hear that a lot of readers of the Manning Early Access Program (MEAP) have found it to be a great guide to Kubernetes.

My aim is to get the reader to understand the technology itself and teach them how to use the tooling to effectively and efficiently develop and deploy apps to Kubernetes clusters. In the book, I dont put much emphasis on how to actually set up and maintain a proper highly available Kubernetes cluster, but the last part should give readers a very solid understanding of what such a cluster consists of and should allow them to easily comprehend additional resources that deal with this subject.

I hope youll enjoy reading it, and that it teaches you how to get the most out of the awesome system that is Kubernetes.