"Kubernetes in action" is a very good book. The first half can get you a pretty good hands-on understanding in 1-2 days.

I would be interested in seeing some links to tutorials about this. In the book Kubernetes in Action, the author provides a very good example of accomplishing this with the Kubeadm tool.

manning book Kubernetes in action was easy( albeit a bit tedious) read.

Manning's Kubernetes in action is a good start, additionally I can recommend everything Kelsey Hightower created on that topic.

Also, I recommend that you first try using kubernetes before you dive in with setting it up. Kubernetes.io has a live tutorial where you can work with a minikube cluster in your browser, afterwards you might want to use Google Cloud's free tier for a small Kubernetes cluster or Minikube until you're comfortable with kubernetes.

For seting up your own cluster, I've heard great stuff about kubernetes the hard way – not to actually set one up, but to learn how the internals work, so you can then fix issues in the cluster you’ll set up with kubeadm/kops/GKE

I was like you, I knew about the "concept" of a pod, and nothing more.

k3s is not very far from the fundamentals. It's really just "one binary" instead of many for the space savings/ simple deployment.

That said, consider Kubernetes in Action by Manning. I'm about 75% done now, was a great help, and I'm continuing with k3s after doing it.

I'll pile on: I'm working through Marko Luksa's "Kubernetes in Action", where he introduces this quaint line of code:

  etcdctl ls /registry

He notes in an aside that you may have to do

  etcdctl get /registry --prefix=true

for later versions of the protocol. But here I am with k8s 1.16, and etcd has been locked in a pod (seriously, why?) so before you contact it you need to "kubectl exec ..."

We're not finished. Apparently the pod was insufficiently secure, because now we need to decorate the etcdctl with a couple certificates, a key, and do SSL encryption to make contact, so in the end I have this wrapper (names changed to protect the guilty):

  $ cat ~/bin/etcdctl
  #!/bin/bash
  declare -A EtcdHost=(
    [clust_prodA]=clust1-leader
    [clust_prodB]=clust2-leader
    [clust_qualA]=clust3-leader
    [clust_testA]=clust4-leader
  )
  if [ ! -z ${EtcdHost[$cluster]:-} ]; then
    export KUBECONFIG=$HOME/.kube/$cluster
    exec kubectl exec etcd-${EtcdHost[$cluster]} -n kube-system -- sh -c "ETCDCTL_API=3 etcdctl --endpoints https://${EtcdHost[$cluster]}:2379 --cacert /etc/kubernetes/pki/etcd/ca.crt --key /etc/kubernetes/pki/etcd/server.key --cert /etc/kubernetes/pki/etcd/server.crt $*"
    exit 0
  else
    echo "No known etcd host for cluster $cluster";
    exit 1;
  fi

The entry points for beginners have been nearly barricaded, and the ladders charred and dangling high.

I just bought Kubernetes in Action (MEAP) last week. I would highly recommend this book. It clearly spells out what it is and how docker containers are just units within a distributed system. Compared to trying to figure out how to properly do networking with Docker Compose, Kubernetes is clearly thought out and much easy to use and reason with. The final version comes out in August.

If you want to get started with Kubernetes I'd recommend either, Kelsey Hightower's Kubernetes the hard way (https://github.com/kelseyhightower/kubernetes-the-hard-way) which is a good way to start getting an understanding of the various components and how they fit together or, if you want to try out running workloads on a cluster, Kubeadm (https://kubernetes.io/docs/setup/independent/create-cluster-...)

If you're interested in books on the topic, I like Kubernetes in Action (https://www.manning.com/books/kubernetes-in-action) or Kubernetes: Up and running (http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920043874.do)

One of the challenges with Kubernetes is that it's pretty fast moving, so it's a good idea to work with resources that are up to date. I know a last commit from May doesn't seem very old but that's going to a least be missing 1.7 and could be missing 1.6 or earlier as well.