Chapters Overview
Explore Kubernetes Recipes — practical, hands-on chapters that tackle real-world Kubernetes challenges. Click each chapter to expand and discover concrete takeaways.
Introduction
Kubernetes Recipes is designed to bridge the gap between "hello world" demos and production-grade Kubernetes engineering. Whether you're deploying on bare metal, cloud, or hybrid infrastructure, these chapters offer bite-sized, practical guides to tackle the real challenges faced by developers and operators. This book emphasizes reproducible patterns, modern tooling, and community-aligned best practices.
Each chapter is standalone, so you can jump to what matters most for your workflow or stack. Think of it as your hands-on field manual to the cloud-native ecosystem.
Chapter 1: Getting Started
Launch a cluster—anywhere, in minutes
- One-command installs of
kubectl, k3s, Minikube and KinD on every OS. - Walk-throughs for HA, hybrid and Raspberry Pi clusters so you can learn on real hardware, not simulations.
- Quick wins: dashboard setup, kubeconfig tips and first deployment.
Chapter 2: Configuring Stateless Applications
Ship lightweight services with zero friction
- Namespaces, multi-container Pods and JSON patches from first principles to production patterns.
- Built-in resource-limit recipes keep noisy neighbours in check.
- Secrets, distroless & enterprise-grade images for rock-solid, secure builds.
Chapter 3: Configuring Stateful Applications
Databases and data that survive pod restarts
- Hands-on PostgreSQL with PVCs, backups and migrations.
- Patterns for polyglot micro-services and CI/CD of stateful workloads.
- Proven strategies to tame complexity and resource waste in legacy stacks.
Chapter 4: Kubernetes on Cloud Providers
Go multi-cloud without vendor lock-in
- GKE Autopilot, AKS, EKS, DigitalOcean & more—step-by-step via CLI or Terraform.
- CNCF conformance tricks to guarantee workload portability.
Chapter 5: Developer Experience
Code, test, debug—no YAML fatigue
- Super-charge the CLI (aliases, krew), Helm & Kustomize for repeatable flows.
- Lens IDE, DevSpace hot-reloading and VS Code integration for instant inner-loop feedback.
Chapter 6: Scaling & Resiliency
Scale to infinity, stay online
- HPA, VPA, Cluster-/Event-driven autoscaling, Karpenter and KEDA in real use cases.
- Zero-downtime rollout recipes (blue-green, canary, surge, vCluster).
- PodTopologySpread & control-plane hardening for fault domains you can trust.
Chapter 7: Storage
Persistent data, the cloud-native way
- CSI vs in-tree drivers, dynamic vs static provisioning, and regional disks on GKE.
- End-to-end walkthroughs for NFS, EFS, Azure Disks & more.
Chapter 8: Networking
Traffic, security & observability on the wire
- From first LoadBalancer to fine-grained NetworkPolicies and Ingress with Istio, Cert-Manager & ExternalDNS.
- Battle-tested checklists for debugging CNI, iptables/nftables and service connectivity.
Chapter 9: Performance Observability
See everything, troubleshoot fast
- Unified stack: Metrics-Server, Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, Jaeger, OpenTelemetry & more—ready to copy-paste.
- Patterns for SLOs, red/black dashboards and load-testing with Locust & Vegeta.
Chapter 10: Control-Plane Admin & Helm
Operate clusters like a pro
- Deep dive into API-server, etcd, schedulers and node life-cycle (drain, cordon, upgrade).
- Helm powerhouse: private repos, plugins and production rollbacks in one place.
Chapter 11: Security
Shift-left, lock-down, sleep-well
- External & native secrets, Pod Security Admission, AppArmor, Seccomp and RBAC walk-throughs.
- Service-mesh-driven mTLS, cert rotation and fine-grained policy with Istio.
Chapter 12: Emerging & Advanced Concepts
Future-proof your platform
- FaaS on K8s, eBPF & Cilium, WASM modules, HPC, AI/ML pipelines and air-gapped DevOps.
- Extend the API with CRDs, webhooks and FeatureGates without forking Kubernetes.
Chapter 13: Best Practices
From good to great in production
- Declarative GitOps, capacity planning, health-checks, immutable images and cost controls distilled into checklists.
Chapter 14: Additional Resources
Stay plugged into the community
- CNCF landscape, contributing guidelines, KubeCon, TAG Sustainability and the business case for cloud-native.
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