Play with Kubernetes Quickly Using Docker

Maybe this is getting lost in translation, but I find this line to be somewhat condescending. I am asking for some hint as to where I can find documentation that goes beyond "here, run the docker/vagrant/VM image, and have fun" - I want to know what is what, which pieces talk to which pieces, and how. I specifically not asking "Is this ready for production" which is a decision I am happy to make for myself, on the basis of the research I hope to do.

Just to be clear: I am an (admittedly increasingly unfashionable) infrastructure guy. I am pretty sure that if I follow your examples, I can get something up and running that allows me to feed some DSL into some tool, and have a running set of containers. Not interesting to me. I am happy to believe that this works, and am happy to take people's word for it.

I want to know and learn about required infrastructure, about failure domains, about networking requirements, about load and overhead, and ultimately, about "If I build something like this, what are going to be the issues in making sure it will never go down". I see a lot of high-level architecture, which appears to segue quite suddenly into "now do magic, and here is how you then start a pod". I am asking about this in between stage, as I have been unable to find this.

> This whole area is still in the early stages; any documentation you see on specifics are likely to be soon out of date.

I would expect any documentation to be at least somewhat relevant to the version it is released with. It isn't important for us to be on the latest greatest - it is important for us to know and understand how the stuff we use behaves and is to be operated, especially in failure modes. If my only recourse during a failure is "well, lets try to restart a container running something critical and lets see if the problem goes away" then indeed it isn't ready for anything other than being a toy.

I do see the likes of Kismatic and now tectonic making moves to run this as a production system, so somewhere, somehow, it would be possible to stand up a system that has not had all the key decisions made for you, and would allow you to build something that is ready for a particular environment.

Kismatic have actually released some packages that appear helpful in pulling the pieces apart and I will be looking at those to get a better understanding of what does what.

> To quote the kub github page: "Kubernetes is in pre-production beta!

Yeah, I saw that, thanks... From the perspective of the Kubernetes team "pre-production" likely means that they have not yet evaluated many probable edge-cases for many different use-types. This is important to them, not so much for me. What is important for me is that my workload works. It is a lot easier and faster for me to test this (and feed back the results, thus helping the project towards production status) on the basis of an infrastructure I know and understand than it is for me to try and put together something something [magic] and trying to figure out stuff isn't working. Case in point: I followed one of the VMware install guides. at the "now run this image, and xyz will happen" nothing happened. No reasonable possibility of troubleshooting, as the image in question was/is a black box, and no documentation I could find, outside of the "invoke these magic incantations".

To be very honest, I am not too bothered - there are plenty of viable alternatives that do the same / similar things. We are evaluating a large list of possible environments, and kube got crossed off the list pretty quickly, which is a pity as it looks interesting.