Kubernetes is a powerful tool. It can help you manage complex applications and provide you with the ability to easily automate tasks involved in managing them. In this course, we will start exploring Kubernetes from a beginner's standpoint. We will discuss what Kubernetes is and what it does, and we will work with some of the basic functionality of Kubernetes hands-on. We will build a simple Kubernetes cluster. We will also deploy a sample microservice application to the cluster in order to explore how Kubernetes can help easily manage such applications.

A Practical Guide to Kubernetes

## Summary

We have a production-ready Kubernetes cluster running in AWS. Isn't that something worthwhile a celebration?

Kops proved to be relatively easy to use. We executed more `aws` than `kops` commands. If we exclude them, the whole cluster can be created with a single kops command. We can easily add or remove worker nodes. Upgrades are simple and reliable, if a bit long. The important part is that through rolling upgrades we can avoid downtime.

There are a few `kops` command we did not explore. We feel that now you know the important parts and that you will be able to figure out the rest through the documentation.

## Next
You might be inclined to think that you are ready to apply everything you learned so far. We are not done yet. There's still one significant topic we need to explore. 

We postponed the discussion about stateful services since we did not have the ability to use external drives. We did use volumes, but they were all local, and do not qualify as persistent. Failure of a single server would prove that. Now that we are running a cluster in AWS, we can explore how to deploy stateful applications.

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In the next lesson, we will go through a comparison of Kubernetes Operations (kops) with Docker for AWS.

# Summary

We have a production-ready Kubernetes cluster running in AWS. Isn't that something worthwhile a celebration?

Kops proved to be relatively easy to use. We executed more `aws` than `kops` commands. If we exclude them, the whole cluster can be created with a single kops command. We can easily add or remove worker nodes. Upgrades are simple and reliable, if a bit long. The important part is that through rolling upgrades we can avoid downtime.

There are a few `kops` command we did not explore. We feel that now you know the important parts and that you will be able to figure out the rest through the documentation.

# Next
You might be inclined to think that you are ready to apply everything you learned so far. We are not done yet. There's still one significant topic we need to explore. 

We postponed the discussion about stateful services since we did not have the ability to use external drives. We did use volumes, but they were all local, and do not qualify as persistent. Failure of a single server would prove that. Now that we are running a cluster in AWS, we can explore how to deploy stateful applications.

---
In the next lesson, we will go through a comparison of Kubernetes Operations (kops) with Docker for AWS.

This lesson summarises what we have learned so far and what we are going to learn next.

What's Next?

Summary