I’m writing a book: Kubernetes for Developers

Quite a number of years ago, I did piece work and later published a book through MacMillan publishing. Being technical books, they are long gone from the shelves as time  made the content irrelevant. Although Gus sometimes likes to poke me saying he found a copy of my book in a used book bin. Strange to think that was 11 years ago.

While spending this summer sabbatical on a lot of traveling, I reflected on what I enjoy. Even while away from computers, I kept my involvement in the Kubernetes project. I find the project extremely compelling, primarily because it works from first principles and builds from there.

What drove me to do the writing is a “You don’t know it until you can teach it” philosophy. And this project is a space I’d like to know, really know. This is what led to deciding to shop around the idea of a book about Kubernetes, written specifically for developers who would otherwise not really interact with it: folks knocking together code in nodeJS or Python that are now getting told “Hey, you get to run this code as well as develop it”: Kubernetes for Developers.

Much of the kubernetes documentation is written for people who are setting up the cluster or running software with it. Most of the people that I see touching on it are the same folks that use Puppet, Chef, Ansible, or Salt. If I were to put a name to this persona, it might be SRE, operations, or classic system administrators. There is some great work (full disclosure: I’m involved in it) happening within SIG-DOCS to make the documentation a lot more relevant and directed to different personas.

I signed a deal with Packt publishing to author Kubernetes for Developers, aimed to be complete in spring 2018. I suspect the space will be pretty crowded by that point.  I have been keeping track of what’s out there: Kubernetes: Up and Running is clearly leading the pack at NovelRank, and there are four or five other books out there – three others from Packt – but so far none focused on developers.

I’m drawing a lot of the ideas for what content to focus on from StackOverflow questions, questions that occur in the Kubernetes Slack, and bugs reported in the project. If you have some opinions on what would be useful to know about or learn, I’m all ears here as well – please leave me a comment, or reach out to me on twitter or github.

I see a lot of  potential in making the architecture and operations of running software far more accessible to developers who have mostly been divorced from it. I think Kubernetes could finally provide a developer-centric Data Center API that I have been hunting for.

My first chapters are blocked out, outline sketched in place to provide some guide rails. I am still trying to get used to Packt’s publishing tools, I definitely prefer using Scrivener by a large margin.