End-to-End Automation with Kubernetes and Crossplane

A complete journey to automating infrastructure provisioning and cloud-native application deployment

Key Features

• Leverage Crossplane and Kubernetes for a unified automation experience of infrastructure and apps
• Build a modern self-service infrastructure platform abstracting recipes and in-house policies
• Clear guidance on trade-offs to manage Kubernetes configuration and ecosystem tools

Book Description

In the last few years, countless organizations have taken advantage of the disruptive application deployment operating model provided by Kubernetes. With Crossplane, the same benefits are coming to the world of infrastructure provisioning and management. The limitations of Infrastructure as Code with respect to drift management, role-based access control, team collaboration, and weak contract make people move towards a control-plane-based infrastructure automation, but setting it up requires a lot of know-how and effort.

This book will cover a detailed journey to building a control-plane-based infrastructure automation platform with Kubernetes and Crossplane. The cloud-native landscape has an overwhelming list of configuration management tools that can make it difficult to analyze and choose. This book will guide cloud-native practitioners to select the right tools for Kubernetes configuration management that best suit the use case. You’ll learn about configuration management with hands-on modules built on popular configuration management tools such as Helm, Kustomize, Argo, and KubeVela. The hands-on examples will be patterns that one can directly use in their work.

By the end of this book, you’ll be well-versed with building a modern infrastructure automation platform to unify application and infrastructure automation.

What you will learn

• Understand the context of Kubernetes-based infrastructure automation
• Get to grips with Crossplane concepts with the help of practical examples
• Extend Crossplane to build a modern infrastructure automation platform
• Use the right configuration management tools in the Kubernetes environment
• Explore patterns to unify application and infrastructure automation
• Discover top engineering practices for infrastructure platform as a product

Who this book is for

This book is for cloud architects, platform engineers, infrastructure or application operators, and Kubernetes enthusiasts who want to simplify infrastructure and application automation. A basic understanding of Kubernetes and its building blocks like Pod, Deployment, Service, and Namespace is needed before you can get started with this book.

Table of Contents

1. Introducing The New Operating Model
2. Examining the State of Infrastructure Automation
3. Automating Infrastructure with Crossplane
4. Composing Infrastructure with Crossplane
5. Exploring Infrastructure Platform Patterns
6. More Crossplane Pattern
7. Extending and Scaling Crossplane
8. Knowing The Trade-offs
9. Using Helm, Kustomize, and KubeVela
10. Onboarding Applications with Crossplane
11. Driving Platform Adoption

About the Author

Arun Ramakani is a passionate distributed platform development and a technology blogging expert living in Dubai, a dynamic city where many cultures meet. He is currently working as a Technology Architect at PwC, specializing in Evolutionary Architecture Practices, Kubernetes DevOps, Cloud-Native Apps, and Microservices. He has over a decade of experience working in a variety of different technology, domain, and teams. He has been part of many digital transformation journeys in the last few years. This book is an inspiration from one of his recent works to adopt Crossplane in a large enterprise successfully. He is enthusiastic about learning in public and committed to helping individuals in their cloud-native learning journey.