Kubernetes is an open source container orchestration platform developed by Google for managing microservices or containerized applications across a distributed cluster of nodes. Kubernetes is highly resilient and supports zero downtime, rollback, scaling, and self-healing of containers. The main objective of Kubernetes is to hide the complexity of managing a fleet of containers. It can run on bare metal machines or on public or private cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure and OpenStack. Kubernetes architecture follows a client-server architecture.

Main Components of the Kubernetes Master Server

• etcd cluster - a distributed key value storage that stores Kubernetes cluster data

• kube-apiserver -the central management entity that receives all REST requests for modifications to cluster elements

• kube-controller-manager - runs controller processes like replication controller (sets number of replicas in a pod) and endpoints controller (populates services, pods and other objects)

• cloud-controller-manager -responsible for managing controller processes with dependencies on the underlying cloud provider

• kube-scheduler - helps schedule the pods (a co-located group of containers inside which our application processes are running) on the cluster nodes based on resource utilization

Main components of the Kubernetes Node (Worker) Server

• kubelet - the main service on a node, taking in new or modified pod specifications from kube-apiserver, and ensuring that pods and containers are healthy and running
• kube-proxy - runs on each worker node to deal with individual host subnetting and expose services kubectl is a command line tool that interacts with kube-apiserver and send commands to the master node. Each command is converted into an API call.

High level Kubernetes architecture showing a cluster with a master and two worker nodes (image source)

Kubernetes Tutorials

Kubernetes is a complex system, and learning step by step is the best way to gain expertise. In this page we’re compiled all the valuable Kubernetes tutorials from multiple sources - from the big players like Google, Amazon and Microsoft, to individual bloggers and community members. Tutorials are classified into the following categories:

• Kubernetes beginner tutorials - basic concepts, installation and deployment

• Kubernetes AWS and Azure tutorials - showing deployment on the popular public clouds, including kops, an official Kubernetes project that can help deploy production-grade clusters on AWS

• Kubernetes Vagrant tutorials - deploying Kubernetes using Vagrant, a tool for provisioning virtual environments

• Kubernetes OpenStack tutorials - deploying Kubernetes on an OpenStack, a popular private cloud platform

• Clustering and federation tutorials - Kubernetes clusters in-depth

• CI/CD tutorials - using Kubernetes to set up CI/CD and continuous deployment pipelines

• Networking tutorials - networking concepts, load balancing, security and more

• Helm tutorials - using the Helm package manager to create charts and deploy them easily on a Kubernetes cluster

• Kubernetes with popular languages and frameworks - Node.js, Python/Django, Ruby/Rails, Spring and Neo4j

• Monitoring tutorials - monitoring Kubernetes deployment using Prometheus and other tools.

• Kubernetes Windows and Mac tutorials - running Kubernetes on popular operating systems

• Kubernetes in other environments - including MongoDB, LAMP and SAP HANA

Kubernetes is extremely powerful but has a steep learning curve. We hope this compilation of tutorials will help you make your next steps towards expertise in this important platform.

You can help us grow and improve this list:

• Found a tutorial that should be removed?
• Have a new tutorial we should add?

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