Kubernetes consultant John Arundel is a highly experienced infrastructure and operations engineer, with over 30 years in the tech industry and several published books to his name, including Cloud Native DevOps with Kubernetes.

What is Kubernetes?

Kubernetes is essentially a platform for building reliable infrastructure:

Kubernetes does the things that the very best system administrator would do: automation, failover, centralized logging, monitoring. It takes what we’ve learned in the DevOps community and makes it the default, out of the box.
—Kelsey Hightower

With traditional virtual servers, there’s a lot of engineering required to deploy your application, scale it, add load balancing, failover, and so. Plus, you have to look after the servers: installing, configuring, patching, updating. Kubernetes does away with all of that, giving you a simple and standard platform which includes built-in load balancing, scaling, and failover.

With a managed Kubernetes service from your cloud provider, such as GKE, EKS, or AKS, you don’t even have the headache of setting up and maintaining the cluster: just click a button!

Kubernetes tutorials

John’s book Cloud Native DevOps with Kubernetes is a complete guide to cloud, containers, and Kubernetes from scratch. Its step-by-step tutorials guide you through building your first container, running it in Kubernetes, and on to more advanced topics like deployments and services.

All the Kubernetes code examples and tutorials are also available free online. A great place to get started is:

• Build and run your first container
• Deploy your first app to Kubernetes

Kubernetes consulting

John Arundel's company, Bitfield Consulting, is one of the best-known Kubernetes consultancies, working with clients all over the world to help them transition legacy applications to Kubernetes, run Kubernetes in production at scale, and manage day-two operations tasks like Kubernetes security, access control, backups, monitoring, logging, tracing, and observability.

John's work with companies like Raspberry Pi Foundation, JustPark, and CareZone involves Kubernetes training, mentoring, and consultancy: advising on how to plan the transition to Kubernetes, sizing and scaling clusters, CI/CD deployment pipelines, integrating with legacy applications, and more.

Bitfield Consulting's many years of experience with Kubernetes across all sectors of the industry can take you beyond simple Kubernetes tutorials to solving the hard problems of operating large-scale distributed systems in production. It can help you answer questions like:

• How do I choose between Docker Swarm and Kubernetes, or between Kubernetes and OpenShift?
• Should I install Kubernetes myself, or use a managed service from Google, Amazon, or Azure?
• How does Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) work in Kubernetes, and how do I use it to help secure my cluster?
• Do I need tools like Prometheus, Istio, or Gluster? How do I use them?
• How do I use Kubernetes Ingress securely? Do I need service mesh, and if so, which?
• How does deployment work in Kubernetes? What are Pods, Services, ConfigMaps, and Namespaces?
• Should I use Helm, kompose, kops, kubeadm, or kustomize?
• How do I manage secrets and configuration in Kubernetes?
• Is K8s certification worthwhile? How do I train my team in best practices for Kubernetes?

If you'd like to know more, and find out what Kubernetes consultancy can do for you, please contact hello@bitfieldconsulting.com.