Jay Vyas - Core Kubernetes

We wrote this book to empower those wanting to take their K8s (Kubernetes) knowledge to the next level by immediately digging into the murky details of various topics related to storage, networking, and tooling.

Although we dont attempt to provide a comprehensive guide to every feature in the K8s API (as that would be impossible), we really believe that, after reading this book, users will have a new-found intuition on how to reason about complex infrastructure-related problems in production clusters and how to think about the overall progression of the Kubernetes landscape in a broader context.

Books exist that allow a user to learn the basics of Kubernetes, but we wanted to make a book that teaches the core technologies that make up Kubernetes. Networking, the control plane, and other topics are covered in low-level detail, which will help you understand how the internals of Kubernetes function. Gaining an understanding of how the system works will make you a better DevOps or software engineer.

Were hoping to inspire new contributors to Kubernetes along the way as well. Please do reach out to us on Twitter (@jayunit100, @chrislovcnm) to get more engaged with the broader Kubernetes community or to help us add more examples where necessary to the GitHub repositories associated with this book.

We want to acknowledge the community and companies that maintain Kubernetes. Without them and their continual work, this software would not exist. We could mention many people by name, but we know we will miss some.

Wed like to acknowledge our friends and mentors in the SIG Network (Mikael Cluseau, Khaled Hendiak, Tim Hockins, Antonio Ojea, Ricardo Katz, Matt Fenwick, Dan Winship, Dan Williams, Casey Calendero, Casey Davenport, Andrew Sy, and so many others); the tireless open source contributors to the SIG Network and SIG Windows communities (Mark Rosetti, James Sturevant, Claudio Belu, Amim Knabben); the original founders of Kubernetes (Joe Beda, Brendan Burns, Ville Aikas, and Craig McLuckie); and the Google engineers, including Brian Grant and Tim Hockin, who joined them shortly thereafter.

This acknowledgment includes the community shepherds Tim St. Clair, Jordan Liggit, Bridget Kromhaut, and so many others. Wed also like to acknowledge Rajas Kakodar, Anusha Hedge, and Neha Lohia for forging an up-and-coming SIG Network India team, which has inspired so much of the content that we hope to add in the next edition (or potential sequel) of this book as we dive deeper into the network or server proxy, kube-proxy.

Jay also would like to acknowledge Clint Kitson and Aarthi Ganesan for empowering him to work on this book as a VMware employee, and his team at VMware (Amim and Zac) for always innovating and being there for us. And, of course, Frances Buran, Karen Miller, and many others at Manning Publications who helped us review this book to get it over the line and into production.

Finally, thank you to all the reviewers: Al Krinker, Alessandro Campeis, Alexandru Herciu, Amanda Debler, Andrea Cosentino, Andres Sacco, Anupam Sengupta, Ben Fenwick, Borko Djurkovic, Daria Vasilenko, Elias Rangel, Eric Hole, Eriks Zelenka, Eugen Cocalea, Gandhi Rajan, Iryna Romanenko, Jared Duncan, Jeff Lim, Jim Amrhein, Juan Jos Durillo Barrionuevo, Matt Fenwick, Matt Welke, Micha Rutka, Riccardo Marotti, Rob Pacheco, Rob Ruetsch, Roman Levchenko, Ryan Bartlett, Ubaldo Pescatore, and Wesley Rolnick. Your suggestions helped make this a better book.

People wanting to learn more about the internals of Kubernetes, how to reason about its failure modes, and how to extend it for custom behavior will get the most out of this book. If you dont know what a Pod is, you may want to buy this book, but get another title that gives you that understanding first.

Additionally, day-to-day operators that want to have a better understanding of the vernacular required for talking with IT departments, CTOs, and other organizational leaders about how to adopt Kubernetes, while retaining core infrastructure principles that existed before the birth of containers, will find that this book really helps to bridge the gap between new and old infrastructure design decisions. Or, at least, thats what we hope!