Networking and Kubernetes: A Layered Approach

One of the worst networking and kubernetes books you could get your hands on onto. Poorly edited and no content whatsoever. The only good thing in this book is its table of content. Interested reader should take note of the possible content and then search them or read them elsewhere. Do not go by the 4* review on Amazon.com. Most of them have been provided by friends.

This book provides a really good starting point for people who have beginner to moderate level knowledge of how networking works in kubernetes and containers. The book starts with overview about Linux networking and TCP/IP architecture and goes further into containers and kubernetes in subsequent chapters. I loved the overall flow of each chapter that covers enough knowledge for anyone to know basics and go explore further without boring to death with advanced stuff. Highly recommend !

Unfortunately, this is just not a very good book. It certainly doesn't live up to what I expect from O'Reilly. Specifically, the technical editing is terrible, and for a book like this that is inexcusable. They should fire the tech editor. I also want to call out that I am particularly appalled by errors in multiple *technical graphics* (diagrams / illustrations) throughout the book. That stuff should be OBVIOUS to any editor - I mean, COME ON GUYS. The 1st chapter tries to explain all of networking in 50 pages (TCP/IP, the OSI 7 Layer model, etc.), and while that is a tall order for any author, they did not succeed in this book. I'm quite new to the depths of IP networking, but I've already read enough in several other books in just the past 2 months to know this attempt is incomplete, disjointed, and totally confusing. Make sure you read other books or docs to learn networking before you attempt this book - you'll need that knowledge to make any sense of the later chapters (You'll also need a pretty good operational understanding of kubernetes overall going in - they assume a lot of prior knowledge throughout the book). Unfortunately that's sort of the trend for the rest of the book. The writing is often times very confusing, explanations are very incomplete or hard to follow, and the authors just aren't that great at explaining complex topics overall. Put another way, the writing just isn't very good. I've read worse, but this is not good. The best aspect of this book are the parts detailing how kubernetes operates within a Linux node at the low level (namespaces, cgroups, iptables, packet routing rules, etc.) - and they do also provide some very helpful debugging tips for how to debug networking and DNS issues in pods/nodes at runtime. That's the best aspect of this book On the flip side, though, they barely scratch the surface of CoreDNS, Ingress/Egress, or Service Meshes at all. For a book focused solely on Kubernetes Networking this is a miserable effort. Two other major complaints I have: 1) They rely on the reader installing and running the "Kubernetes in Docker" cluster distribution (aka "KinD") for many of their tutorial examples - but this is a non-standard distro which can NOT be used in a production deployment, and which adds a considerable layer of complexity to working with K8s compared to any other normal cluster (due to the 2x nesting within Docker) – yet they never do anything to explain or raise caution to the reader about any of that. I know better, but many won't, and it's sloppy and lazy of them not to call it out. They should have used a normal distribution throughout. 2) The last chapter does a reasonable job of *introducing* the reader to how one might deploy a simple k8s app to the 3 major cloud providers' *managed* K8s offerings (which are: EKS / AKS / GKE ) -- but they don't even write a single sentence around how one might deploy or manage K8s outside of a managed service. A book on this topic should have a full chapter, at least, on how the reader can deploy and manage networking issues for a *full* *custom* installation of K8s to their own cloud or data center (including networking issues around control plane, etcd, controllers, etc.). They don't even ALLUDE TO networking issues on the control plane or API level AT ALL. So - I really can't recommend this book for anything beyond the low-level Linux and network debugging / troubleshooting tips. Other K8s books I've already read explained as much about K8s networking in a few chapters as these guys did in an entire book. Your money is better spent elsewhere, most likely.

Book has contents from another book.. Amazon zero help on refund.

Poor quality printing. Diagrams full of insidious errors. Too many typos in the text, and then we come to the content. The content itself could have been better organised by clearly separating the abstractions (for developers in the audience) and the implementation (for networking engineers in the audience). That way, one section could have been an in-depth guide and the other a reference, depending on the reader’s background.

hätte nie von O'Reilly erwartet, dass er so etwas verkauft. Auf dem Cover steht "Networking und Kubernetes", aber innen ist es anders !!!!! sei vorsichtig