PHP and Kubernetes: The Complete Guide to Orchestration

The book "PHP and Kubernetes" is a practical guide for developers who want to take their PHP projects to a new level of fault tolerance and flexibility. In the era of microservices and cloud infrastructure, the ability to work with Kubernetes is becoming a mandatory skill for a senior developer. The author, Alexey Vetrov, who has 10 years of experience in DevOps and PHP development, will guide you step by step from packaging a simple PHP application into a Docker image to deploying a full-fledged production cluster.

What is this book about?

• PHP Containerization: creating lightweight images using php:8.2-fpm-alpine, optimizing layers, and caching Composer dependencies.
• Kubernetes Basics: Pods, Deployments, Services, ConfigMaps, Secrets — all with examples using real PHP scripts.
• Scaling: horizontal scaling of PHP-FPM, session management via Redis, working with queues (RabbitMQ/Kafka) inside the cluster.
• CI/CD: configuring GitLab CI or GitHub Actions for automatic building, testing, and deploying PHP applications to Kubernetes.
• Monitoring and Logging: integration with Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, and the ELK stack for collecting metrics and logs from PHP applications.
• Security: managing secrets, network policies, resource limits, and Pod Security Policies.

Who is this book for?

• PHP developers at the Middle level and above who want to master modern deployment approaches.
• DevOps engineers working with PHP projects who want to deepen their knowledge of orchestration.
• Team Leads and architects planning a transition from a monolith to a microservice architecture.

What will you learn?

• How to write a Dockerfile for a PHP application following best practices.
• How to deploy a local cluster using Minikube or Kind.
• How to configure load balancing, rolling updates, and auto-scaling.
• How to store configuration and secrets for different environments (dev/staging/prod).
• How to integrate a PHP application with Service Mesh services (Istio).

The book contains many ready-made YAML manifests, checklists, and practical exercises. All examples are available in a repository on GitHub. After reading, you will be able to independently deploy a high-load PHP project in Kubernetes, configure its monitoring, and automate the release process.

This is not dry documentation, but a living guide with an emphasis on real-world cases: from typical containerization mistakes to optimizing cloud resource costs. Suitable for working with both cloud managed clusters (Yandex Cloud, AWS EKS, GKE) and self-hosted solutions.

Make your PHP stack modern and reliable with Kubernetes!