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about the technology

A “platform” is a complete system of services, storage, and infrastructure to deploy, host, and manage an application. Cloud providers such a AWS and Azure offer pre-built platforms that allow some customization. By creating your own platform using Kubernetes and other open source software, you can match the needs of your applications exactly.

about the book

Platform Engineering on Kubernetes accelerates development of cloud-based systems with vibrant open source tools of the Kubernetes ecosystem. You’ll use powerful open source projects like Helm, Tekton, Knative, and Crossplane to automate your projects from design through delivery. Learn how to package services, build and deploy services to a Kubernetes cluster, and combine different tools to solve the complex challenges of building your own Kubernetes-based platforms in a cloud native environment.

One thing is clear, Platforms are a collection of services that help companies to get their software running in front of their customers (internal or external). Platforms aim to be a one-stop shop for teams to have all the tools that they need to be productive and continuously deliver business value—with the rise in popularity and with the growing demand to improve development cycles, platforms that once used to provide us with computing resources had leveled up the stack to provide more and more services.

In this book, we will focus on organization-specific platforms, not generic Cloud Platforms that you can buy off the shelf, like those offered by Cloud Providers. We also want to focus on Platforms that can work On-Premises on our organization’s hardware. This is important for more regulated industries that cannot run on Public Clouds. This forces us to have a broader view of tools, standards, and workflows that can be applied outside the realm of a Cloud Provider. Consuming services from more than one Cloud Provider is also becoming increasingly popular. This can result from working for a company that acquired or became acquired by another company using a different provider, ending up in a situation where multiple providers must coexist, and there should be a shared strategy for both.

The kind of platforms we will be looking at extends with custom behavior the layers mentioned before to include company-specific services that allow the organization’s development teams to build complex systems for the organization and their customers.

about the reader

For developers and software architects familiar with the basics of containers and Kubernetes.

about the author

Mauricio Salatino is a staff engineer at VMware, where he works for the Knative project. He has previously worked as a Kubernetes trainer for LearnK8s, and as a senior software engineer for Red Hat/JBoss in the Business Automation R&D department. Mauricio is an active open-source contributor for different projects, including Jenkins X, Spring Cloud, and JHipster, a three-time speaker at Kubecon, and has been involved in the Kubernetes community since 2016.