It’s been a little over six months since Kubernetes for Developers hit the streets. It has been interesting to see the uptake, and where the holes have been from what I first envisioned.
The metrics I receive on book sales are unfortunately wan – nothing so effective as a daily metric for either sales or general engagement. Well, nothing that is shared with me. I was tracking the site with bookrank.com, but they went defunct and shut down, so about the only useful metrics I can see is the Amazon page rank information on the book’s amazon page.
What I learned more organically is that while some developers appreciated the book a surprising number didn’t have the same base level of knowledge that I thought they might. Some of the feedback I’ve received included questions about DNS, how to use linux command line tools, and general confusion about ports and IP addresses. Most of these questions came from people new to development, folks who “heard about Kubernetes” and wanted to know if or how they could take advantage of it.
The technical content for the book is getting low but consistent traffic at GitHub. The python demo application a bit less traffic than the nodejs demo application. No real questions or queries through GitHub, but I think unless you’re reading the book itself, you wouldn’t be aware of the GitHub project.
One area that I wish I delved (and knew) more about before I finished the book was ingress. Although in hindsight, this area is one of the perennial sore spots in Kubernetes – a beta feature for the past 9 releases with no consolidation progress, but with some actually interesting uptake at the edges of the Kubernetes project itself – with related projects blurring lines into service meshes, or being semi-solid commercial implementations over software or physical load balancers.
If I had written anything in depth, it probably would have been best about the stock Nginx ingress controller, as that seems to be about the most default – and the advances from some of the open source projects since I published – such as Heptio’s Contour – have been pretty amazing and interesting.
Another area that’s been a surprising win has been cert-manager, a wonderful tool for publicly hosted Kubernetes clusters to help deploy and manage signed TLS certificates through LetsEncrypt. Since I didn’t get anything useful written about ingress or this lovely gem, I am working on an open source documentation contribution including a quick-start for cert-manager that will hopefully be done and live shortly.
There is also just a huge learning curve for developers to adopt and engage with Kubernetes. The concepts aren’t impossible, but there are a lot of them and the topics are complex and intertwined. Even with the complexity, gaps, and edge cases that bite I am still a huge fan of the project. I see it as the best choice for “software that helps you keep your software up and running” when you can take advantage of it.
Rhonabwy 