Production Kubernetes

Chapter 1. A Path to Production

Over the years, the world has experienced wide adoption of Kubernetes within organizations. Its popularity has unquestionably been accelerated by the proliferation of containerized workloads and microservices. As operations, infrastructure, and development teams arrive at this inflection point of needing to build, run, and support these workloads, several are turning to Kubernetes as part of the solution. Kubernetes is a fairly young project relative to other, massive, open source projects such as Linux. Evidenced by many of the clients we work with, it is still early days for most users of Kubernetes. While many organizations have an existing Kubernetes footprint, there are far fewer that have reached production and even less operating at scale. In this chapter, we are going to set the stage for the journey many engineering teams are on with Kubernetes. Specifically, we are going to chart out some key considerations we look at when defining a path to production.

Defining Kubernetes

Is Kubernetes a platform? Infrastructure? An application? There is no shortage of thought leaders who can provide you their precise definition of what Kubernetes is. Instead of adding to this pile of opinions, let’s put our energy into clarifying the problems Kubernetes solves. Once defined, we will explore how to build atop this feature set in a way that moves us toward production outcomes. The ideal state of “Production Kubernetes” implies that we have reached a state ...