Thanks to the authors. This comprehensive book on Kubernetes came at the right time.This book starts with the basics and continues to build and build and build. I appreciate the pacing as there is a lot of information covered, and the authors did a great job of not skimming over content. For example, Kubernetes resources are covered thoroughly. I have experienced some books that tend to end up providing nothing more than a list or a repeat of the help content.I would recommend this to those wanting to start using K8s and those with a moderate amount of experience. The scope is huge but all major aspects of hosting a K8s solution are covered from basic operation to networking and security to more complex scenarios using a service mesh. I also found this guide helpful for a PaaS Kubernetes offering (Azure Kubernetes Service).

The chronology of chapters in this book has been set strategically to increase the complexity as I proceed. The best thing I liked about the book is no alien term is left unexplained. You don't need to google or refer any external material to understand the concepts described in this book.

What I found interesting about this book is that it isn't monotonous. In fact, it presents two different angles of perspective on the functioning of Kubernetes and I found that they at times complement each other. The book is detailed in optimum amount - not going too deep into the basics but at the same time ensuring it doesn't leave any important aspect unexplained.

Ok, for starters, if you want to know why you should read this book, take a look at the author's LinkedIn profiles. Both of them have years of experience in multiple portions of Information Technology and they have been working with Kubernetes, almost from the beginning.With that said, their experience and presentations doesn't mean that they can write books, right? Well, I am happy to say that they can write, and I think they write and explain everything very well. The format of this book is great for most learners. They tend to explain a topic which then blends into an exercise to help you learn the topic. I personally love this versus reading 40+ pages of theory and, maybe, get an exercise at the end of the chapter. Their GIT repository scripts are something I find myself using a few times a week to create test environments, which are well worth the price of the book by themselves.Does the book have any negatives? Very few, but there are some. For some reason the review questions in some chapters don't see to have answers, but I assume they will release an update in their GIT that will include the answers. Either way, it's not the end of the world.I wanted to call out some chapters and topics that I found very interesting and informative. I really like the use of kind for the clusters. I know others like Minikube, or even Docker desktop, but those are both have limits, and they have options to install add-ons like the K8s dashboard, where you don't learn how to do it at all. Using kind makes sense to me, it's small and you can run it on any machine that has Docker or another container runtime, including WSL2, Linux, Windows, or Mac.I really like the bootcamp chapter as a refresher, I learned about a few resources that I rarely use, or even heard of. The services chapter is a mammoth chapter, and not just the printed chapter, they continue a complex deployment using kubeadm to demonstrate the OSS project called K8GB. This was one of my favorite topics in the book and we plan to implement it at work based on my team testing it using the scripts from the authors.So many people have no idea how to secure a cluster with identity management. A lot of people use certificates for users and as the book points out, this is a nightmare and contrary to common beliefs, not a secure model. Instead, they explain OIDC in K8s in a way that anyone can learn it and to top it off, they include script to deploy OIDC with a container that appears to be a form of an Active Directory. It's not covered in the book, but I found out that you can add users by editing a config map in the namespace where the pod is running.I also loved the Istio chapters. Sure, they won't make you a service mesh expert, but that's not possible in just 2 chapters. The chapters provide enough information to make installing and working with Istio resources a lot less scary than it would be without the chapters.Finally, chapter 14 is another huge chapter that cover what could be an entire book by itself. I still like the chapter since it gets into CI/CD and uses a number of OSS tools to introduce you to pipelines. This has been an area I have been meaning to dive into more and reading this book, and chapter, was a great jumpstart to that.It's a big book, clocking in at over 500 pages, while so many other K8s books barely break 350+ pages. Something tells me they could have created a book that was triple what it is! K8s is a big and complex topic, and the chapters contain the perfect number of details to get the reader excited and comfortable on each of them.Do yourself a favor, stop searching for topics on Google that can lead you to blog that might just confuse you more than necessary, or posting questions in forums just to have someone make a sarcastic remark about your question. I have had my team read this book, and every topic can transfer to a large cluster, even though they use kind for the examples. Even the scripts work on a real-world cluster!

I was a fan of the first edition of this book and when the second edition was announced so quickly, I was skeptical. Since the first edition was a unique book with the merging of theory with labs intertwined, I took the plunge and pre-ordered the second edition.The first chapter is just the base Docker, which I think is needed since the book exercises use KinD, but I'm glad they removed the other two Docker chapters from the first edition. From there the book has been updated for a new KinD version and the K8s bootcamp has some good updates. Chapter 4 and beyond is where it gets interesting. I loved the updates to the services chapter, it includes new scripts and a section on global load balancing using K8GB. The K8GB section even includes scripts and docs in book repo to step you through using kubeadm and a Windows DNS server that allows you to simulate two regions and fail a DNS record between the clusters for high availability. The updates to the Identity Management sections are excellent as well, including new scripts to deploy the OIDC provider. In this update they have included a container that acts as the backend Active Directory for the OIDC server. With one script you will have an OIDC server with a local directory that you can use for advanced features and to learn about JSON web tokens.Other chapters have great updates as well. My favorite update is the Falco chapter which covers all new features of Falco and even uses Falcosidekick to trigger a function that is created using Kubeless to create a network policy to stop a pod from communicating on the network!It's not all about just the updates in the second edition. The updates are great but they also added chapters, including one on Istio that covers installing Istio and using Kiali to observe the mesh, and the second chapter expands on the basics by authentication services and users using the tokens from the OIDC server. The scripts shine here too. Using two or three scripts you can create a new KinD cluster that includes Istio, OIDC and Kiali with token integration!!!I know this is a long review, but I really wanted to leave one since I have enjoyed the second edition even more than the original, first edition. These guys obviously don't just know what Kubernetes is, they know how it should be deployed and secured for any enterprise. This is a must have reference for anybody interested in Kubernetes and how it should run in the real-world.