Production Kubernetes

Foreword

It has been more than six years since we publicly released Kubernetes. I was there at the start and actually submitted the first commit to the Kubernetes project. (That isn’t as impressive as it sounds! It was a maintenance task as part of creating a clean repo for public release.) I can confidently say that the success Kubernetes has seen is something we had hoped for but didn’t really expect. That success is based on a large community of dedicated and welcoming contributors along with a set of practitioners who bridge the gap to the real world.

I’m lucky enough to have worked with the authors of Production Kubernetes at the startup (Heptio) that I cofounded with the mission to bring Kubernetes to typical enterprises. The success of Heptio is, in large part, due to my colleagues’ efforts in creating a direct connection with real users of Kubernetes who are solving real problems. I’m grateful to each one of them. This book captures that on-the-ground experience to give teams the tools they need to really make Kubernetes work in a production environment.

My entire professional career has been based on building systems aimed at application teams and developers. It started with Microsoft Internet Explorer and then continued with Windows Presentation Foundation and then moved to cloud with Google Compute Engine and Kubernetes. Again and again I’ve seen those building platforms suffer from what I call “The Platform Builder’s Curse.” The people who are building the platforms ...