12 Under the hood of Kubernetes
This chapter covers
- Understanding how Kubernetes components work together under the hood
- Debugging Kubernetes - understanding how the components break
- Designing chaos experiments to make your Kubernetes clusters more reliable
Finally, in this third and final chapter on Kubernetes, we dive deep under the hood and see how Kubernetes really works. If I do my job well, by the end of this chapter you should have a solid understanding of the components that make up a Kubernetes cluster, how they work together, and what their fragile points might be. It’s the most advanced of the triptych, but I promise it will also be the most satisfying. Take a deep breath, and let’s get straight into the thick of it. Time for an anatomy lesson.
As I’m writing, Kubernetes is one of the hottest technologies out there. And it’s for a good reason; it solves a whole lot of problems that come from running a large number of applications on large clusters. But like everything else in life, it comes with some costs. One of them is the complexity of the underlying workings of Kubernetes. And although this can be somewhat alleviated by using managed Kubernetes clusters, where most of it is someone else’s problem, you’re never fully insulated from the consequences. And perhaps you’re reading this on your way to a job managing Kubernetes clusters, which is yet another reason to understand how things work.