Onur Yilmaz - Extending Kubernetes: Elevate Kubernetes with Extension Patterns, Operators, and Plugins

The future is in the skies.

Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, Founder of Turkish Republic

In recent years, applications have become smaller and more self-governing with the microservices paradigm shift. Furthermore, they are built, tested, and deployed as containers with less overhead and flexibility. Thus, if you aim to develop the applications of the future, you need to aim for the clouds and containers. However, the management of distributed applications in a scalable, reliable, and flexible way is not straightforward. You need a well-architectured abstraction layer between applications and the clouds. Kubernetes has become the de facto orchestrator for cloud-native applications running in the containers with its open architecture and industry adoption.

Kubernetes is a complex but open system with well-designed extension points and plugins. It is possible to extend Kubernetes by implementing the APIs in a cloud-native way and make it work for your custom requirements and infrastructure. This book is a comprehensive guide for understanding the extension patterns and discovering the extension plugins for Kubernetes. In this book, you will learn the state-of-the-art extension patterns and extension points of Kubernetes in depth with real-life use cases and examples. You will have a comprehensive overview of all possible aspects of Kubernetes, starting from end user to the fully automated controller development. Also, the book focuses on creating applications that not only work on Kubernetes but also interact and operate Kubernetes itself.

This book is for a wide range of audience, including, but not limited to, software engineers, developers, DevOps engineers, cloud security analysts, architects, and managers who have Kubernetes in their short- and long-term plans. However, this is not a starters guide to containers, cloud providers, or Kubernetes. It is expected to have an introductory knowledge and hands-on experience on Kubernetes to grasp the content fully and follow up the activities.

In the following chapters, Kubernetes API and extension points with respective design patterns will be covered with their theoretical background, hands-on activities, and exercises. At the end of the book, you will be more enthusiastic about the future of Kubernetes and how you will extend the Kubernetes to enrich its ecosystem.