Review: Kubernetes in Action by Marko Luksa

If you’re going to use Kubernetes, you need to read this book.

• It covers absolutely everything you need to know, starting with a basic intro to Docker and going deeper and deeper until you’re taking a detailed look at Kubernetes internals. I was particularly happy to see all the different ways you can interact with Kubernetes, including the kubectl CLI, the REST API, local proxying, SSH, ambassador containers, and so on.
• It’s nicely organized so you can skip to exactly the content you want.
• It’s well written, with tons of clear examples, diagrams, and code samples.
• It does a great job of showcasing the depth and breadth of Kubernetes as a platform and just how many hard problems it solves that we all used to solve (poorly) on a one-off basis, including deployment, monitoring, config management, secrets management, service discovery, volumes, volume claims, proxying, SSH access, powerful CLI, dev environment, multi cloud support, DNS, daemon jobs, replication, one-off tasks, config file updating, authn and authz, and so much more. Kubernetes isn’t an orchestration system—it’s an entire cloud operating system.

Perhaps the only flaw is that it doesn’t put Kubernetes in context—the book isn’t very opinionated, so it doesn’t talk about Kubernetes strengths and weaknesses, how mature some of the features are (many of which are labeled as “beta”), how it fits in with other DevOps tools and concerns, and so on—but the book is already over 600 pages long, so it’s not reasonable to expect it to cover everything. And what it does cover—how to use Kubernetes—it does very well. I’ve recommended this book to everyone on my team and will recommend it to customers as well.

Rating: 5 stars