Books

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.

Build. Deploy. Scale.Take your Java skills to the cloud-native level with Hands-On Java with Kubernetes. From your first Spring Boot or Quarkus app to production-ready deployments with CI/CD, observability, and service mesh—you’ll learn by doing, not just reading. Ideal for developers who want to master Kubernetes without getting bogged down in YAML configuration.

Go from an empty cluster to a self-deploying GitOps pipeline, doing every step yourself: Applications, sync policy, hooks, RBAC, Helm, ApplicationSets, and a setup that ships every branch on push. You finish with a pipeline you can explain line by line, not a demo you watched run.

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.

Build a clear mental model of Kubernetes with illustrations, diagrams, small YAML examples, and practical kubectl commands. This beginner-focused guide connects core concepts to networking, storage, security, and everyday troubleshooting for systems engineers.

Get started with Kubernetes fundamentals step-by-step.

Build and operate production AI platforms on Kubernetes. Learn to manage NVIDIA GPUs, serve and optimize LLMs with vLLM, run training and batch workloads, and design secure, observable, multi-tenant infrastructure for AI at scale.

Does Kubernetes feel overwhelming? This is the technical prequel you need. Stop copying Dockerfiles blindly and master the foundations: images, networks, volumes, and Docker Compose. The definitive guide to understanding containers and building the solid base every DevOps engineer needs.

Ingress-NGINX is retired and about half of all clusters still run it. This is the step-by-step playbook for moving production traffic to Kubernetes Gateway API: a verified annotation-by-annotation map (including every no-equivalent case and its workaround), a decision matrix for nine implementations, inventory scripts, zero-downtime cutover and rollback runbooks, and twelve before/after manifests validated against the real CRD schemas.

Dive into Docker & Kubernetes—no prior experience needed!From building your first container to deploying scalable applications, Docker & Kubernetes: A Beginner's Practical Guide gives you hands-on, ready-to-use commands to master containerization and orchestration. Start small, think big, and deploy like a pro!"

Learn real DevOps by building a production-style environment on your laptop. No cloud bills or subscriptions. Just systems you control end-to-end.

Twenty-four chapters, twenty-three labs on your own laptop, and several that break Harbor on purpose. Install it on a VM and on Kubernetes, gate deployments on scans and signatures, back it up in an order you can defend — and become the person responsible for the registry, not just the one who installed it.

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.

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. At the end your developers write code with local and external models through a governed gateway.

"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."