PHP and Kubernetes: Orchestration of High-Load Applications

Modern PHP development is impossible without understanding containerization and orchestration. The book "PHP and Kubernetes" is a practical guide that will take you from basic concepts to industrial deployment of high-load PHP applications in a Kubernetes environment.

What is this book about?

The book covers the full lifecycle of a PHP application in Kubernetes: from packaging code into Docker images to configuring autoscaling, monitoring, and CI/CD pipelines. You will learn how to adapt typical PHP applications (on Laravel, Symfony, Yii, or vanilla PHP) to the requirements of cloud infrastructure.

Main topics:

• PHP Containerization: creating lightweight Docker images, optimizing layers, working with Composer and Nginx in containers.
• Kubernetes Basics: Pod, Deployment, Service, Ingress, ConfigMap, Secrets — using PHP applications as examples.
• State Management: working with sessions, caching (Redis, Memcached), and databases in a cluster.
• Scaling: horizontal autoscaling (HPA), update strategies (Rolling Update, Blue/Green).
• CI/CD for PHP: configuring GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, or Jenkins for automated build and deployment.
• Monitoring and Logging: Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, ELK — integration with PHP applications.
• Security: secret management, network policies, pod security policies.

Who is this book for?

• PHP developers (middle/senior) who want to master modern deployment and operations methods.
• DevOps engineers who need to understand the specifics of PHP in a container environment.
• Team leads and architects planning a transition to a microservice architecture or cloud infrastructure.

What will you learn after reading?

• How to properly package a PHP application in Docker (considering performance and security).
• How to deploy a multi-tier application (PHP-FPM + Nginx + MySQL/PostgreSQL) in Kubernetes.
• How to configure automatic scaling under load.
• How to organize seamless deployment without downtime.
• How to monitor PHP performance (OPcache, slow queries, memory leaks) in a cluster.

The book contains many practical examples, ready-made Kubernetes manifests, and automation scripts. All examples are tested on current versions of PHP 8.x and Kubernetes 1.28+.

This is not just theory — it is a set of proven solutions for real projects. Start your journey to professional orchestration of PHP applications today!