welcome
Hello, and thank you for purchasing the MEAP edition of The Road to Kubernetes. I wrote this book after over a decade’s worth of deploying applications into the wild as a guide to help you better understand your deployment options without spending decades or thousands of dollars to do so.
After completing this book, you will be able to answer the question: should we use Kubernetes? Deploying software has always been a thrill of mine because it’s where the rubber hits the road, so to speak. If your software isn’t deployed, does it even exist? Kubernetes is one option for deploying software, but it is often perceived as too complex for the vast majority of deployments and developers. By the end of this book, I hope to dispel this perception, or at least give you a solid mental model of how and when you can start leveraging Kubernetes.
If you’ve never deployed a web application into production before, this book will be a goldmine of learning because you’ll get to experience 15+ years’ worth of deployment options condensed into a digestible book. These deployment options are all modern approaches to cutting-edge and mature technologies that leverage a source-code-tracking and version control tool called Git. Being Git-first with deployments unlocks a layer of portability that’s incredibly challenging to achieve otherwise (ahem—I’m looking at you, FTP).
We start with deploying directly to virtual machines with two of the most popular programming languages for server-side web applications: Python and the JavaScript runtime Node.js. Soon after, we’ll move into deploying nearly any programming language by leveraging container technologies, pioneered by Docker. As you may know, Kubernetes manages and runs container-based applications, and thus, learning how to create, run, and deploy containers is a key element of this book.
Containers are one of the best ways to supercharge your application’s portability. Portability means flexibility, and often huge time and cost savings to your bottom line. Deploying and managing containers in production gets more and more challenging as the demands of your software grow. Kubernetes is arguably the most popular way to deploy and manage containers in production.
The journey you are about to embark on in this book has been traveled by many, but not as many as the world needs. We’re about to see an explosion in software development thanks to generative artificial intelligence so we need more people like you taking this road to help bring applications to others around the world.
Like all good journeys, I hope this book gives you the confidence to ask better and more interesting questions. Please reach out to me if any questions arise, so I can help you and others like you navigate them, and feel free to post any comments or suggestions you have about the book in the liveBook discussion forum.
Thank you again, and good luck.
Cheers!
Justin Mitchel
In this book
Appendix A Installing Python on macOS and Windows Appendix B Installing Node.js on macOS and Windows Appendix C Setting up SSH keys for password-less server entry Appendix D Installing and using ngrok