Kubernetes The Hard Way

Kubernetes (K8s) is an open-source container orchestration system hosted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. It manages containerized applications across multiple hosts, providing mechanisms for deploying, maintaining, scaling, and scheduling workloads. Applications can be configured with YAML and deployed across hybrid-cloud environments; the platform is also used for production operations involving storage, databases, networking, and security hardening.

Cluster API is an open-source Kubernetes subproject focused on declarative APIs and tooling for provisioning, upgrading, and operating multiple Kubernetes clusters. Developed by the Kubernetes SIG Cluster Lifecycle, it uses Kubernetes-style APIs and patterns to define cluster configuration and supporting infrastructure—including virtual machines, networks, load balancers, and VPCs—for consistent, repeatable deployments. Providers extend it to infrastructure platforms such as AWS, Azure, and vSphere, while kubeadm is provided as a built-in bootstrap and control-plane provider.

Talos Linux is a modern, minimal Linux distribution built for running Kubernetes. Developed and supported by Sidero Labs, it is immutable and hardened, with all system management performed through an API rather than a shell or interactive console. API access uses mutual TLS authentication, while immutable infrastructure and atomic updates are intended to reduce configuration drift and support predictable Kubernetes and Linux updates. The project is fully open source and production-ready.

Kustomize is a Kubernetes configuration customization tool sponsored by the Kubernetes SIG CLI. It processes raw, template-free YAML without modifying the original files, using declarative kustomization files to combine resources, apply patches and labels, generate resources such as ConfigMaps, and create overlays for development, staging, and production variants. It can wrap separately managed Kubernetes and CRD files and reference external files without copying their full contents into a repository. The resulting YAML can be emitted with `kustomize build` and applied directly with `kubectl`; Kustomize is also integrated into kubectl.

Helm is a Kubernetes package manager for creating, sharing, installing, and managing charts. A chart is a package of preconfigured Kubernetes resources containing a package description in Chart.yaml and one or more templates for Kubernetes manifests; charts can be stored locally or fetched from remote repositories. Helm renders chart templates and communicates with the Kubernetes API to install and manage releases, and can run on a developer machine or in CI/CD. The videos also describe using Helm to package Crossplane compositions with little or no templating and distribute them as versioned OCI artifacts.