So You Want To Kubernetes 2018-05-11
Kubernetes is slowly eating the world {{Citation needed}}. With this, we’ve seen many teams dipping their toes into the container-y water. It’s entirely cliché at this point to call Kubernetes “bleeding edge”, but it really is easy to get lost or overwhelmed with all the changes happening all the time. Fortunately there are some places that can help.
But before I jump into those, a word for people at the very start of their Kubernetes experience. It has been a long time since I first went through the basics of Kubernetes so it’s hard to know where is the best place to begin these days. I do generally hear good things about Kubernetes: Up and Running. I also highly recommend spinning up a cluster with either GKE or Minikube (probably don’t start with kops+AWS, it’s a bit more involved) and doing toy deployments of some simple web services. Wordpress is usually a great application to start with, as it’s small and fairly self-contained depending on how you set it up. Start with some mix of those options and then come back to this post when you have your sea legs.
But back to folks that are past the initial stumbling blocks and are trying to keep up on the shifting best practices, third-party tools, and core features.
KubeWeekly
If you are going to stop reading after one suggestion, KubeWeekly is the one to follow. It provides a solid overview (almost) every week of things to read, new ecosystem tools, and upcoming community events. You can subscribe via either email or RSS.
LWKD
KubeWeekly is a great overview of user-level things, but for those that want to peer a little deeper, Last Week in Kubernetes Development is a similar weekly summary of changes and decisions in the Kubernetes core development team. This is a great way to learn about new features as they are being added, or to see when features move along the stability track.
kubernetes/features
If you want even more visibility into the development process, the kubernetes/features
repository acts as a central tracking point for almost all major changes in
Kubernetes. It’s not as much of a firehose as following the projects themselves,
but you’ll get updates on all new feature proposals or changes to existing
features. A word of warning though, you might want to set up some email filters
to hide the messages generated by the various helper bots that patrol the repo.
Kubernetes Podcast
If you prefer to get your info via ear waves, there is a new podcast from Google entirely about Kubernetes: Kubernetes Podcast. Only two episodes so far, but many more to come.
Kubernetes Slack
Another great way to stay involved in new developments are the many SIG channels in the Kubernetes Slack team. I’ll put aside discussions of if Slack is a valid replacement for IRC and just say that Slack is where a lot of conversations happen, so if you want to see those conversations, Slack is the place to be.
Hangops Slack
While the official Kubernetes Slack is home to the SIG development teams, it
can sometimes be a bit quiet for general conversation. I highly recommend the
#kubernetes channel in the Hangops public Slack, and it’s a great place to
socialize with other ops-y folks beyond that. Even just as a lurker, its a way
to hear about new and useful tools more or less as soon as they come out, even
if a common pattern is “Has anyone heard of X?” “No, but it looks nifty”.
Community Meeting
While LWKD does summarize the community meeting each week, you can also join for yourself and see first hand what direction things are moving in. It takes place on YouTube/Zoom every Thursday at 6PM UTC, with video recordings posted to YouTube soon thereafter.
/r/kubernetes
If Reddit is more your speed, the Kubernetes subreddit is relatively active and so far mostly free of the toxic nonsense that makes most of Reddit a hazmat zone.
To Infinity And Beyond!
This list is only scratching the surface of the Kubernetes community. As with most things in open-source, when you have questions the best thing to do it to ask them. Hopefully I’ve given you a jumping-off point to try and make sense of this wild and crazy world that is Kubernetes. If you have suggestions for more things to add, let me know on Twitter.
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