Production Kubernetes: Building Successful Application Platforms

Kubernetes has become the dominant container orchestrator, but many organizations that have recently adopted this system are still struggling to run actual production workloads. In this practical book, four software engineers from VMware bring their shared experiences running Kubernetes in production and provide insight on key challenges and best practices.

The brilliance of Kubernetes is how configurable and extensible the system is, from pluggable runtimes to storage integrations. For platform engineers, software developers, infosec, network engineers, storage engineers, and others, this book examines how the path to success with Kubernetes involves a variety of technology, pattern, and abstraction considerations. With this book, you will:

• Understand what the path to production looks like when using Kubernetes
• Examine where gaps exist in your current Kubernetes strategy
• Learn Kubernetes's essential building blocks-and their trade-offs
• Understand what's involved in making Kubernetes a viable location for applications
• Learn better ways to navigate the cloud native landscape

About the Author

Josh Rosso has been working with organizations to adopt Kubernetes since version 1.2 (2016). During which he's worked as an engineer and architect at CoreOS (RedHat), Heptio, and now VMware. He's been involved in architecture and engineering to help build compute platforms in financial institutions, establish edge compute to support 5g, and much more. Environments have ranged from enterprise-managed bare metal, to cloud-provider managed virtual machines.

Rich Lander was an early adopter of Docker and began running production workloads using containers in 2015. He learned the value of container orchestration the hard way and was running production applications on Kubernetes by version 1.3. Rich took that experience and subsequently worked at CoreOS (RedHat), Heptio and VMware as a field engineer helping enterprises in manufacturing, retail and various other industries adopt Kubernetes and cloud native technologies.

Alex Brand started working with Kubernetes in 2016, when he helped build one of the first open source Kubernetes installers at Apprenda. Since then, Alex has worked at Heptio and VMware, designing and building Kubernetes-based platforms for organizations across multiple industry verticals, including finance, healthcare, consumer, and more. As a software engineer at heart, Alex has also contributed to Kubernetes and other open source projects in the Cloud Native ecosystem.

John Harris has been working with Docker since 2014, consulting with many of the top Fortune 50 companies to help them successfully adopt container technologies and patterns. He brings experience in cloud-native architecture, engineering and DevOps practises to help companies of all sizes build robust Kubernetes platforms and applications. Prior to working at VMware (via Heptio), he was an architect at Docker advising some of their most strategic customers.