Kubernetes

This 2026 edition of the best-selling Kubernetes book is fully updated for the latest versions of Kubernetes and the latest industry trends. You won't find a better and more up-to-date book on Kubernetes. Hand-crafted over the past 8 years by best-selling author Nigel Poulton. This book is a masterpiece.

Most Kubernetes books teach you YAML. This one teaches you to build a datacenter.You start with #!/usr/bin/env bash. You finish with one command that provisions, reloads, and tears down a complete multi-service cluster. No magic. No black boxes. Just you, Bash, and the cloud-native platform you built yourself.

You can read about Vault in an afternoon. You will still not be able to run it. Twenty-four chapters, each ending in a working lab on your own laptop — and five that ask you to break your setup on purpose, because nobody who has recovered a sealed cluster under pressure learned it from a reference manual.

Somewhere there is a server with two GPUs for which no operational process exists. This book turns that into an operable platform — hands-on, in 23 labs: vLLM, KServe, LiteLLM, the NVIDIA GPU Operator, Keycloak, OpenBao, ArgoCD, pgvector. Not a tutorial: a reference work that shows the derivations behind every setting.

Build a cloud-native distributed system in Go with authentication, databases, Kafka, gRPC, circuit breakers, and distributed tracing. Each chapter teaches a pattern and extracts it into a reusable platform SDK. By the final chapter, you'll have six deployable services, a complete platform SDK, and the patterns to build the next one faster.

This 2025 edition of Quick Start Kubernetes is bang up to date with the latest versions of Kubernetes and industry trends. Brought to you by best-selling author and global training guru Nigel Poulton, Quick Start Kubernetes is the fastest way to wrap your head around Kubernetes and get your hands on deploying a simple app. When you've finished the book, you'll be ready to use Kubernetes in the real world.

Learn Argo Rollouts through hands-on Kubernetes labs. Build canary and blue-green deployments, control traffic with Istio, validate releases with Prometheus, run Experiments, automate promotion and rollback, and manage progressive delivery with Argo CD and GitOps.

"Is your EKS cluster running on borrowed time?Every 4 months, Kubernetes releases a new version—and AWS only supports the last four. Falling behind isn’t just risky—it’s a ticking time bomb. Security vulnerabilities, unsupported workloads, and forced emergency upgrades can cripple your operations, costing you 3-5x more in downtime and stress.But what if you could upgrade your EKS clusters with zero downtime, zero stress, and zero surprises?In Amazon EKS Upgrade Playbook, you’ll uncover the step-by-step, battle-tested strategies to plan, execute, and validate upgrades like a pro—so you can stay ahead, avoid disasters, and deploy with confidence.Upgrade smarter. Upgrade safer. Upgrade now."

Master Kubernetes health checks from the basics to production-grade reliability. Learn how probes really work, troubleshoot failures fast and build applications that recover automatically. With practical YAML, real-world scenarios and proven reliability patterns, this guide helps you keep Kubernetes workloads healthy when it matters most.

Stop overload from becoming unbounded queues, goroutines, and downstream calls. Build bounded backpressure that fails predictably.

"Tired of manual server setups that feel like reinventing the wheel every time?What if you could write down your server settings once—like a recipe—and let the computer do the rest? No more ‘oops, I forgot that checkbox.’ No more ‘Why is Server 7 acting weird?’Config as Code is the DevOps secret to consistency, speed, and sanity. And this book is your backstage pass."

Another Production Field Manual: protect APIs before overload becomes an outage with rate limiting, throttling, and tenant fairness.

Learn how to stop retry storms, contain dependency failures, and make resilient microservice calls observable, bounded, and production-ready.

Prepare for Kubernetes platform engineering interviews like a Staff Engineer. Learn how controllers, informers, syncers, finalizers, API scalability and multi-tenancy behave in real systems, then put it all into practice with a hands-on workspace-syncer capstone project. A practical guide to reasoning, designing, debugging, and explaining Kubernetes control-plane systems.