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.

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.

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 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.

Learn how to build Kubernetes Operators from scratch using Kubebuilder, step by step. You will create real controllers, work with CRDs, and understand how reconciliation works in practice. By the end, you’ll know how to design, test, and run your custom operator.

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!"

Kubernetes exposes plenty of state, but operators still have to reconstruct operational meaning from scattered Pods, Services, EndpointSlices, Events, PVCs, owner references, and status fields. This ebook uses `kctx`, a small read-only Kubernetes context engine, to show how deterministic entities, relations, signals, graphs, namespace snapshots, CRD adapters, and stable JSON contracts can turn raw cluster data into reusable context for humans, tools, and AI agents. It is written for SREs, platform engineers, Kubernetes operators, infrastructure developers, and AI tooling builders who want better primitives than raw YAML and improvised troubleshooting pipelines.

Go services often fail in production for boring reasons: weak probe semantics, missing timeout budgets, unsafe retries, noisy telemetry, and rollout settings that look fine until traffic spikes. Go Apps on Kubernetes is a practical pocketbook for engineers who ship and run Go microservices on K8s. It gives you concise, production-focused guidance you can apply immediately: health/readiness contracts, graceful shutdown and draining, retry/backoff patterns, observability defaults (metrics, logs, traces), security hardening baselines, and deployment/autoscaling templates. No theory dump, no platform-admin detours. Just reusable patterns and incident-oriented checklists to help your services start cleanly, degrade predictably, and recover fast.

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.

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 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.

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.

"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.