Beyond the Kube is a meandering journey into what it takes to deploy and manage reliable systems inside Kubernetes when using the cloud is not an option. Some use-cases simply cannot be run in the cloud, or it may not be possible to simply hand off the control plane to a cloud provider.
When that happens, a lot of the APIs and infrastructure that we take for granted in the cloud is suddenly missing, and very noticeably absent; storage API, load balancers, elastic scaling, logging and monitoring. Even something as simple as terminating TLS or IAM can suddenly become a project.
Moving into a position where these questions are answered in a reliable way can be daunting, but that is exactly the challenge my team faced when rolling out Kubernetes in our business. When I looked around for resources to help move us forward I found that, although Kubernetes is extremely widely used, there are very few online resources to help understand how to manage these on-prem deployments.
Beyond the Kube is destined to become that resource.
Note that this is not an anti-cloud blog; there are many great reasons to simply grab a container engine form your favorite provider and get going. Where applicable, I will use shortcuts like that to demo components that would otherwise take a large amount of hardware or time to implement.