Chapter 1, Understanding Kubernetes Architecture, briefly introduces the main objectives of this book and container orchestration in distributed systems. It takes the reader through the fundamental guiding principles used to build Kubernetes, and covers the design in detail.

Chapter 2, Creating Kubernetes Clusters, is a hands-on chapter in which the user will create several Kubernetes clusters using different tools that vary from quick test clusters to full-fledged industrial strength clusters.

Chapter 3, Monitoring, Logging, and Troubleshooting, explains approaches to event monitoring, logging events, and metric collection from Kubernetes clusters. This will let the reader identify and analyze patterns in cluster behavior.

Chapter 4, High Availability and Reliability, introduces best practices for highly available architectures. Kubernetes can be configured in a variety of ways for high availability and considers cost/performance tradeoffs, live upgrades, and performance bottlenecks.

Chapter 5, Configuring Kubernetes Security, Limits, and Accounts, gives the reader insight into how to secure Kubernetes for production via SSL API, add-ons, Docker authentication, and so on. It explores various security topics, digging deeper into admission control, interfaces to external authorization systems, and namespaces.

Chapter 6, Using Critical Kubernetes Resources, in this chapter, you will participate in the design of a complex microservice-based system. It will consist of a walkthrough deployment of Kubernetes resources, where each resource will be mapped to its counterpart in the application structure or configuration.

Chapter 7, Handling Kubernetes Storage, in this chapter, the reader will be given an explanation of persistent volumes in Kubernetes. The reader will be taken through different storage types in Kubernetes, mapped to specific use cases.

Chapter 8, Running Stateful Applications with Kubernetes, explains problems users will face when running legacy monolithic stateful applications and services such as databases, message queues, and so on. This chapter also introduces environmental shared variables and DNS records for clustering stateful applications.

Chapter 9, Rolling Updates, Scalability, and Quotas, explains advanced Kubernetes features such as horizontal pod auto scaling, cluster size, and rolling updates. It also covers Kubernetes scaling testing and tooling for stress testing.

Chapter 10, Advanced Kubernetes Networking, explains container network interfaces for third-party SDN plugins. It covers in detail CNI plugins, load balancing, and network security policies.

Chapter 11, Running Kubernetes on Multiple Clouds and Cluster Federation, explains how to deploy Kubernetes clusters in production on several specific platforms (bare metal, AWS, GCE). It also explains the need for cluster federation in real world.

Chapter 12, Customizing Kubernetes - APIs and Plugins, explains how to work with Kubernetes at the API level, as well as use cases and motivation to develop third-party resources. The reader will also be introduced to the types of plugins that Kubernetes supports and how to develop custom plugins.

Chapter 13, Handling the Kubernetes Package Manager, explains how to handle Kubernetes applications as packages. It discusses how to find and install existing Helm packages, as well as how to write your own Helm charts.

Chapter 14, The Future of Kubernetes, peers into the future and presents a roadmap and trends for Kubernetes, as well as its position in the orchestration scene and a comparison with its competitors.