The Children's Illustrated Guide to Kubernetes

As this is putatively a children's illustrated guide, I will allow myself to say that I do not trust that owl at all. I do not like that owl which put the innocent and helpless giraffe down in the cargo hold of its exceptionally dodgy ship and kept it locked down there with all the other animals and brainwashed it into thinking that it is happy. I do not like that owl that smiles a benevolent smile and laughs a hearty laugh without twitching the beak on its expressionless face. The one which is incredibly obviously a pirate because of its hat. That one.

That said, the pictures are very nicely drawn, I would encourage the author to illustrate his writings in the future.

I would pay good money to have complex topics like this presented in the illustrated child fable format. I can imagine learning a university level course on security/network/OSI model protocols (boring as F*) but presented in a human readable narrative with characters and story arcs. My brain would remember it so god damn well.

Looks like illustration 12 got replaced with a repeat of 10 at the end, the file is there and matches the text: https://deis.com/images/blog-images/kubernetes-illustrated-g...

I kept waiting for Captain Kube to kill Phippy.

Nice but wouldn't have hurt to throw in a simple little story, like "The Mange guide to Electricity". I already had a good understanding of electricity/electronics when I read that but the narrative created this fun refresher instead of the usual dry books you read on the subject.

The story helps me ground topics. It's weird but very effective. I highly recommend it if you are playing with Arduino/RASPI and want to go to that next level. Actually, I can't think of one subject that wouldn't be fun to learn with a Manga guide (they already have lots of them, Calculus, Linear Algebra, Physics).

Kudos to the author for making the images 3840x2560. Not only are they fantastic illustrations, they are somewhat future proof, as they will scale nicely on 4K+ resolution displays.

Kudos to Matt Butcher - The man always had a fantastic ability to distill information down to its most essential and consumable form.

Can someone do one of these on monads too? Heh...

Hilarious! On a serious note though; Phippy should be an elephant, not a giraffe...

I like the children's illustrated guide concept (for adults). You definitely took it to an extreme here in terms of the characters and storyline. Assuming you aren't really trying to start a children's book series, I think if you toned down the cuteness just a little bit, you might have something interesting in explaining complex concepts.

Technical writing at its best. I wouldn't say the fate of the giraffe is something to envy. Just look at the final post-namespace picture.

This is fantastic in terms of quality and in terms of being unique as a format for conveying complex technical info. Thanks!

I love this concept. Great work and it really helps make a complex topic understandable.

Pffft, dial up days are over. Thank you for using large images, looks great on high-dpi.

Wonderful illustrations. However, I'm going to dissent on its benefits as a guide. For me, this makes a common mistake in "simplified" technical writing: it assumes you already possess the knowledge that the author does. An example:

  > Kubernetes uses labels as "nametags" to identify things.
  > And it can query based on these labels. Labels are open-
  > ended: You can use them to indicate roles, stability, or
  > other important attributes.

Using nametags as an analogy is great, but what's the querying for? The image shows a bullet point "Can query based on these labels". What can query, and when does it query? Is it Kubernetes can query, or I can query? Why would I want to query? And what's an example of a role? How does one indicate stability? Is stability labeling when a container has been running unreliably recently, or does stability mean that it's a beta version, or something else? What is an example of an "other important attribute"?

And so on... many other knowledge assumptions are made. The primary deficiency is that it doesn't present the story in terms of a problem to be solved. It's a solution presented as if you already know the full context of the problem, which is its achilles heel.

I exaggerate a little here, but I'll recap the story with what essentially are the questions I have remaining if I don't make many knowledge assumptions after having read it a few times. I know I can apply my experience to make intelligent assumptions and fill in the gaps, but you did say this was a guide for children, and I don't expect them to have decades of experience. Here's my recap:

So some giraffe doesn't like its environment and decides to go floating on an ocean, eventually gets picked up by a ship captain, is thrown into a pod (apparently along with an imaginary other container I have to pretend doesn't exist), and has an unexplained fetish for cloning. Why would a giraffe want to clone itself? Then some tunnel opens up to the rest of the ship. Does this mean that the captain, who has a penchant for picking up random strangers in the ocean, has now given access to my stuff to everybody else riding on the ship? What if some of those other random strangers are malicious? This tunnel sounds like a bad idea. Why do I want to be discovered, or discover others? Then the giraffe gets a gift and stores it in a shared location. Why would other clones need access to a private gift? Does that mean the elephant, lion, and turtle hiding in the closet now have access to my gift too? I don't know or trust them. Then namespaces are introduced, ostensibly as a means to have privacy. But wait... I thought my container, or my pod was private. I used it to get away from the scary shared hosting, but it sounds like it's no different here. And what is a namespace? Is it related to the "Hello my name is ______" image that was used for labels? Maybe it labels groups of things together? I'm not sure how revision control system (rcs) fits into this. Maybe I can store multiple versions. At any rate, it shows that a namespace lets you keep secrets from each other. Oh, maybe this is a better place to store my gift than a volume. Volumes can be read by any pod (and I don't want that pesky lion and turtle reading my things) so I'll keep it secret in a namespace... somehow. I hope my gift isn't too large to store it there. I'm told that a namespace isolates me from the rest of the cluster, but this is the first time the word cluster is introduced other than the original, highly technical explanation which resulted in the "Huh?" response that triggered this children's story.

Again, nice illustrations and a good effort. But I'm left confused about what all this stuff is because I don't know the answers to some of the assumptions you've made. I still have no idea why a PHP app with only one page needs all this complexity. It's just one page, right?

Thanks for this, I try to tell my fiance what I do at my job but she hasn't understood until now!

He meant to write "Dearest Father, whose knowledge is incomparable, what is Kubernetes?"

Is that title a Diamond Age reference?

Next: The Children's Illustrated Guide to Docker Networking.

i have never read something so entertaining and enlightening!! Thank you for that.

I love this!

what about Mesos?

Please use JPGs that are not bigger than 50kB. More than 20 3MB images was about to eat my daily 3G data cap

Not bad.

Images were a bit oversized.

It's cute but does anyone else feel this helps perpetuate the man child stigma of our industry?