Josh Rosso - Production Kubernetes

by Josh Rosso , Rich Lander , Alexander Brand , and John Harris

Copyright 2021 Josh Rosso, Rich Lander, Alexander Brand, and John Harris. All rights reserved.

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978-1-492-09230-8

[LSI]

It has been more than six years since we publicly released Kubernetes. I was there at the start and actually submitted the first commit to the Kubernetes project. (That isnt as impressive as it sounds! It was a maintenance task as part of creating a clean repo for public release.) I can confidently say that the success Kubernetes has seen is something we had hoped for but didnt really expect. That success is based on a large community of dedicated and welcoming contributors along with a set of practitioners who bridge the gap to the real world.

Im lucky enough to have worked with the authors of Production Kubernetes at the startup (Heptio) that I cofounded with the mission to bring Kubernetes to typical enterprises. The success of Heptio is, in large part, due to my colleagues efforts in creating a direct connection with real users of Kubernetes who are solving real problems. Im grateful to each one of them. This book captures that on-the-ground experience to give teams the tools they need to really make Kubernetes work in a production environment.

My entire professional career has been based on building systems aimed at application teams and developers. It started with Microsoft Internet Explorer and then continued with Windows Presentation Foundation and then moved to cloud with Google Compute Engine and Kubernetes. Again and again Ive seen those building platforms suffer from what I call The Platform Builders Curse. The people who are building the platforms are focused on a longer time horizon and the challenge of building a foundation that will, hopefully, last decades. But that focus creates a blind spot to the problems that users are having right now. Oftentimes we are so busy building a thing we dont have the time and problems that lead us to actually use the thing we are building.

The only way to defeat the platform builders curse is to actively seek information from outside our platform-builder bubble. This is what the Heptio Field Engineering team (and later the VMware Kubernetes Architecture TeamKAT) did for me. Beyond helping a wide variety of customers across industries be successful with Kubernetes, the team is a critical window into the reality of how the theory of our platform is applied.

This problem is only exacerbated by the thriving ecosystem that has been built up around Kubernetes and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). This includes both projects that are part of the CNCF and those that are in the larger orbit. I describe this ecosystem as beautiful chaos. It is a rainforest of projects with varying degrees of overlap and maturity. This is what innovation looks like! But, just like exploring a rainforest, exploring this ecosystem requires dedication and time, and it comes with risks. New users to the world of Kubernetes often dont have the time or capacity to become experts in the larger ecosystem.

Production Kubernetes maps out the parts of that ecosystem, when individual tools and projects are appropriate, and demonstrates how to evaluate the right tool for the problems the reader is facing. This advice goes beyond just telling readers to use a particular tool. It is a larger framework for understanding the problem a class of tools solves, knowing whether you have that problem, being familiar with the strengths and weaknesses to different approaches, and offering practical advice for getting going. For those looking to take Kubernetes into production, this information is gold!

In conclusion, Id like to send a big Thank You to Josh, Rich, Alex, and John. Their experience has made many customers directly successful, has taught me a lot about the thing that we started more than six years ago, and now, through this book, will provide critical advice to countless more users.

Joe Beda

Principal Engineer for VMware Tanzu, Cocreator of Kubernetes,

Seattle, January 2021