Book review — 50 Kubernetes Concepts Every DevOps Engineer Should Know

50 Kubernetes Concepts Every DevOps Engineer Should Know

Author — Michael Levan

Publisher — Packt

Page count — 278

First published — January 2023

Disclaimer: I received a copy of this publication for review purposes.

Views presented in this review are subjective.

I review the book “as is” — I focus on what I see, read, touch, etc.

Photos published here are under the “for review” purposes.

Preview of the First chapter is available on Packt website: https://www.packtpub.com/product/50-kubernetes-concepts-every-devops-engineer-should-know/9781804611470

Some backstory —As a DevOps trainer I need to learn a lot. This time I’ve decided to read up on concepts related to Kubernetes, a popular container orchestration system.

Title of the book got my attention. I thought that the author described 50 techniques on handling Kubernetes. Well, the book is not about Kubernetes handling techniques as I though. It’s about 50 concepts related to Kubernetes in general, and does it well.

Overview

This publication is just 278 pages, with a plenty of code snippets examples and screenshots. I think that’s a good idea to keep a publication short, as it can be time consuming to read longer publications of 500 pages. I’d say books are bloaty enough nowadays, so it’s refreshing to read a shorter book.

The publication is divided into three parts and an index:

Part 1 — First 20 Kubernetes Concepts — In and Out of the Cloud

Part 2 —Next 15 Kubernetes Concepts — Application Strategy and Deployments

Part 3 — Final 15 Kubernetes Concepts — Security and Monitoring

Part 1 describes shortly the theory behind Kubernetes, then moves on to concepts such as technical requirements for Kubernetes in Azure, AWS and GKE. Following that, readers can read about Linode Kubernetes Engines, DigitalOcean Kubernetes Engine and OpenShift. This part finishes with specifications required to have an on premise Kubernetes.

Part 2 covers next 15 concepts, this time related to strategy and deployments such as how to deploy Kubernetes in a cloud native environment, stateless and statefull apps, Kubernetes troubleshooting, Helm charts, CI/CD, GitOps and more.

And finally in Part 3 readers can familiarize themselves with concepts related to Kubernetes monitoring, observability.

All in all I’d say that 3 parts of the book are rather evenly matched.

My opinion

This is an interesting publication for people who need to learn more about Kubernetes and related concepts in general.

As the author has put in the introduction part — this is a book covering many topics related to Kuberneres, many of which could be described in books of their own.

Indeed, many of mentioned topics are already described in other books, focusing on those particular areas such as telemetry or container security.

What I like about this publication is its broad range of topics covered — I have been searching for such a publication that covers most aspects related to Kubernetes, in one place, instead of searching on various websites and searching in other, more specialized publications for snippets of information that I need at any given time.

I’ll be using this publication from time to time, it’s useful for trainers like myself.

Physical vs Digital copy

All depends on your preferences. I’ve been reading mostly printed copy, sometimes getting back to my Kindle.

Here are two pictures to reference the text, scale.

Minor gripes

As with previous Packt publications — in a physical copy the font & diagrams are small, prolonged reading under non-optimal lightmay result in an eyestrain.

Margins in a physical copy are also small once again— as in case of Cloud Computing Demystified for Aspiring Professionals .

Similar to other Packt books this one also has a glued spine — prolonged use may lead to book falling apart, especially considering that one needs to open up the book rather wide due to short margins.

Aside of technical nuances I have no additional comments regarding content, I’ve found it useful.

Summary & Closing thoughts

This is a good publication for people who want to learn more about Kubernetes in general.

Experienced engineers may find this publication useful as a way to review some concepts, a refresher, though if such people are looking for detailed description on how to implement particular concepts — well, I’d say they would need to look for other books describing topics in low-level, technical details.

This publication in my opinion is useful for educators in DevOps topics as it provides a good overview of the Kubernetes topic, withouth going into low-level details about how different concepts work.

Due to the pace that technology develops, I’d say that knowledge contained in this publication would be good for 2–3 years, though it’s only my opinion.

Thanks for reading and untill next one,

MJ