My predictions in Kubernetes and Platform Engineering for the next 5-7 years 👇🏻 ✅ Kubernetes

I spoke to a few colleagues in various roles and based on my research combined with my experience, I believe Kubernetes has a solid 3-4 years left in the tank before it’s just there in the background and no one cares about it.

But then what’s next?

What are the 50 Kubernetes concepts that you should know?

Well, I like to break them down into three sections:
- Day Zero
- Day One
- Day Two

A thread 🧵 Day Zero is all about the planning and architecture phase. How will your environment look?

Kubernetes isn't something that you just "turn on" and walk away.

It's a platform that has to be considered a main part of how you deploy.

But how?

A thread 🧵 It should be looked at no different than when you began to implement VMWare on bare metal or the cloud in your environment.

Kubernetes can't be something that's just on the back burner and implemented with 10% capacity. You have to think about:

If you have an EKS cluster, that EKS cluster will have an IAM Role associated with it.

Ensure that the Role has all permissions needed.

For example, if you need to create Volumes for k8s, it'll need the following Policy Attachment.

How did I find this out?

#kubernetes #AWS First, I tried to create a PVC and noticed that it was in a Pending state

So... what is Kubernetes?

As Kubernetes continues to gain popularity, engineers have to know how Kubernetes works, and why it might make sense in their environment.

A thread 🧵 Here are a few questions that you should ask yourself

- What benefits does Kubernetes bring to environments?
- What do technologies like containerization do for organizations?
- Does Kubernetes actually help teams?

Are you using Ingress Controllers in your Kubernetes environment?

If not, let's break down what they are.

A thread 🧵 At a high level, Ingress Controllers are:
- Specify multiple paths
- Specify multiple services

All in one load balancer.

Let's break it down.

Role Based Access Control (RBAC) is arguably one of the biggest headaches for engineers in a Kubernetes cluster.

However, there are certain ways to make it far easier.

A thread 🧵 Before jumping into that, let's talk about RBAC.

When you're trying to access a Kubernetes cluster and perform an action, it takes two roles:

- Authentication
- Authorization

Are you thinking about taking the Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) exam?

A thread 🧵

#kubernetes #devops #docker If so, ensure that you're comfortable in the following domains:
- Kubernetes storage
- Troubleshooting system components (control planes and worker nodes)
- Pod and other workload scheduling (including high availability)

(cont)

Are you using GitOps today in your Kubernetes cluster?

If not, let me show you how to get a GitOps operator up and running in under EIGHT minutes.

a thread 🧵 Using Flux (a popular GitOps operator), you can:
- Install the controller on a Kubernetes cluster
- Connect to a GitHub org
- Point to a source control repo
- Deploy an app
- Have it managed by GitOps

If you want to be successful in the cloud-native world, here's what you need to know:

- Cloud and virtualization
- Operating systems and networking
- CICD
- Coding
- Security
- Application development workflows
- Architecture

A thread 🧵 - Troubleshooting
- Containers and orchestration (Kubernetes or another orchestration system)
- Observability/monitoring

I'm going to voice an extremely unpopular opinion.

One that could even get me "cancelled"...

There are quite a few different research firms out there, and we all know the big names.

A thread 🧵 When you peel back the curtain, it's typically not real research that goes into it.

It looks like the following at a high level:
- There's a paper that needs to be written based on demand.
- You pick X amount of vendors to go into the paper.

(cont)

Developers do a TON of tests.

From unit tests to mock tests to integrations tests and the list continues.

But with Kubernetes Manifests, there aren't a lot of tests going on.

A thread 🧵 There's a lot that can go wrong with a Kubernetes Manifest which includes :
- Using out-of-date APIs.
- Policies that your organization set aren't being used.
- Bad practices used like using the latest version of a container image.

GitOps is the equivalent of a Kubernetes Controller

A Kubernetes Controller, which runs on the Kubernetes Control Plane, ensures that the observed state of the cluster matches the desired state

A thread 🧵 A Kubernetes Controller, which runs on the Kubernetes Control Plane, ensures that the observed state of the cluster matches the desired state

When you're putting any application on Kubernetes, you have to confirm a few things if you want a successful deployment.

A thread 🧵 A few things to keep in mind are:
- Is the Pod healthy
- Is the Pod running as expected
- Does Kubelet know when to restart a failed/unhealthy container
- Should a Pod receive requests
- Should Kubelet start accepting traffic

Learning Kubernetes isn't just about learning Kubernetes.

If you want to deploy to Kubernetes, what do you need? An app. To deploy an app, you need to learn a programming language.

Deploying to a cluster and needing things like load balancers, clustering, and...

A thread 🧵 self-healing, you need to understand how infrastructure works on the backend.

To automatically deploy apps to Kubernetes clusters, you need to know CICD and/or (I'd recommend "and") GitOps