Front matter

 

preface

Over the Christmas holidays in 2016, I sat down to learn Kubernetes. I was soon to join the Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) team and needed to learn how this platform worked—and quickly. I’d previously used several Platform as a Service (PaaS) environments to deploy stateless applications in a scalable way, and I was excited by the opportunity that Kubernetes presented: the flexibility to run anything you could package in a container paired with the versatility of various workload constructs from stateless to stateful applications and batch jobs. Like many, perhaps, I found there was a bit of a learning curve when starting out.

By early 2017, I’d gained some knowledge and was now a product manager on the GKE team, interacting frequently with developers. One such developer was my brother, who was migrating his startup from a PaaS to Kubernetes. I was able to share everything I’d learned so far and hopefully helped him skip some of the newbie mistakes I made. But I wished there was a simpler way to transfer this knowledge: content specifically written for the application developer who wants to deploy onto a production-grade system without needing to learn the whole system at the outset.

acknowledgments

about this book

Who should read the book

How this book is organized

About the code

liveBook discussion forum

Additional online resources

about the author

about the cover illustration