The Children's Illustrated Guide to Kubernetes

https://deis.com/blog/2016/kubernetes-illustrated-guide/

by nslater • 10 years ago

402 56 10 years ago

deis.com

gm-conspiracy• 10 years ago

Not bad.

Images were a bit oversized.

danvoell• 10 years ago

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.

escape_goat• 10 years ago

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.

facorreia• 10 years ago

Looks like the owl took the giraffe prisoner to conduct unethical experiments like cloning.

sgoings• 10 years ago

I read that as "conduct unethical experiments like coding."

_asummers• 10 years ago

dodgy

I really wish Americans said this word more frequently. It accurately describes so many things, it's a shame we don't.

andrewflnr• 10 years ago

I agree, but I think you have to admit the usual alternative "sketchy" is pretty expressive as well. :)

ktzar• 10 years ago

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

Pica_soO2• 10 years ago

Solving infra-structure problems by reeducating Producers and Consumers, are we?

Should send all those content-devs to labourcamps, one year for every full mb! ;)

nslater2• 10 years ago

Oops. Thanks for flagging that. Shrunk them.

Pica_soO2• 10 years ago

Is that title a Diamond Age reference?

leetbulb• 10 years ago

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

ones_and_zeros• 10 years ago

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

orthecreedence2• 10 years ago

I think a bunch of 22 year-olds making $150K straight out of college does a bit more damage in that department than an illustrated Kubernetes guide.

abledon2• 10 years ago

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.

corysama• 10 years ago

You'd like "The Manga Guide to Databases" :)

Read the reviews here https://www.amazon.com/Manga-Guide-Databases-Mana-Takahashi/...

Then buy it direct here https://www.nostarch.com/mg_databases.htm

abledon2• 10 years ago

YEah ! I love that book. I wish companies paid artists to collaborate with their technical writers to deliver engaging content tutorials in graphic novel format. I think in terms of memory stimulation --->

text + (color + emotion + narrative) > text

The Greeks could memorize incredibly long speeches because they set up such weird memorization queues with bizarre imagery/stories to trigger passages from one topic to the next. Narrative inside technical documentation could leverage this as well.

fudged71• 10 years ago

My professor taught locks and race conditions with a game of chopsticks in front of the class. It felt silly and childish at the start but I'll never forget it!

tomc1985• 10 years ago

Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby comes to mind...

daxelrod• 10 years ago

Brett Victor's Aligator Eggs helped me to finally understand beta reduction in Lambda Calculus. http://worrydream.com/AlligatorEggs/

Something about the colors and pictures clicked in my brain in a way that Greek letters did not.

gumby• 10 years ago

How about the Manga Guide to Linear Algebra (https://www.nostarch.com/linearalgebra)?

If that's too adult, there's always the story of Ping: https://www.amazon.com/review/R2VDKZ4X1F992Q/ref=cm_cr_dp_ti...

nercht12• 10 years ago

Thanks for the links! Good to see such books aren't lost in total obscurity as I had suspected. Seems to me that "educational fiction" tended to be text-books poorly-disguised as stories, so I intend to do book for Physical Chemistry that flips it around: a story that happens to talk about the chemistry extensively (although, like most side projects, due to lack of funding/incentive that project is "taking it's own sweet time" going anywhere).

enobrev• 10 years ago

After reading Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud [1], I came to a similar realization, and wish he could provide the same depth and thoughtful illustration to many more subjects, especially technical or mathematical. Even if comics aren't your thing, I would _highly_ recommend this book. It's a fantastic lesson in communication and composition.

1: http://scottmccloud.com/2-print/1-uc/

iamtew• 10 years ago

You might enjoy the SELinux Coloring Book then, https://github.com/mairin/selinux-coloring-book

udkl• 10 years ago

True, those are great illustrations.

Can anyone point me in the direction to get started with creating these kind of illustrations ?

_nickwhite• 10 years ago

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.

asherkin• 10 years ago

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...

nslater2• 10 years ago

Thanks for catching this. Fixed!

semi-extrinsic• 10 years ago

Typo in Kubernetes here:

"And other applications can find your service through Kurbenetes service discovery"

Edit: also "ephmeral" on the Volumes drawing.

dopu• 10 years ago

Other typo: "who's knowledge is incomparable" should be "whose knowledge is incomparable."

Thanks for the guide; I enjoyed reading it.

matt_kantor2• 10 years ago

I guess this is where we're submitting typos.

"Persiste" should be "persist" on the "Containers" graphic (https://deis.com/images/blog-images/kubernetes-illustrated-g...).

shardo• 10 years ago

I don't it's fixed, I find the last image to be the same as the 10th.

cristiancavalli• 10 years ago

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

heybrandons• 10 years ago

I love this!

rodionos• 10 years ago

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.

Negative1• 10 years ago

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).

sesteel• 10 years ago

I kept waiting for Captain Kube to kill Phippy.

jondubois2• 10 years ago

Haha. Yeah, the real story would probably be better told as a horror story...

Captain Kube captures Phippy and locks him in a dark container on his ship and forces him to perform repetitive work around the clock without any breaks - To make matters worse, Captain Kube begins carrying out highly hazardous experiments on Phippy which involves cloning him, messing with the clones and then mercilessly slaughtering them one by one in a seemingly endless cycle of violence and suffering.

kylek• 10 years ago

I'm imagining netflix's chaos monkey as king kong boarding the ship and wreaking havoc on the boat and its crew.

jondubois2• 10 years ago

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

orthecreedence2• 10 years ago

Phippy is a PHP app, not a Java app.

matt_kantor2• 10 years ago

I assume that's a joke about bloat, but anyway: http://php.net/elephpant.php

moondev• 10 years ago

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

larrymcp• 10 years ago

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

svieira• 10 years ago

You mean, something like Functors, Applicatives, and Monads in Pictures[1]?

[1] http://adit.io/posts/2013-04-17-functors,_applicatives,_and_...

thanatropism• 10 years ago

Isn't a monad just an endofunctor on the category of monoids?

moron4hire• 10 years ago

No, you're thinking of a dish served at Chipotle.

dfsegoat• 10 years ago

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

smegel• 10 years ago

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

asdf4life• 10 years ago

what about Mesos?

ignorantguy• 10 years ago

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

caleblloyd• 10 years ago

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

vixen99• 10 years ago

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

biot• 10 years ago

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?

The Children's Illustrated Guide to Kubernetes

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