This is yet another accidental purchase of a self-published book, although I think this one makes a lot of sense as a self published work. Writing a technical reference book isn’t a particularly lucrative pastime for most authors, and self publishing likely makes it more worthwhile than the traditional publisher route, especially if you can rustle up a good set of technical editors and reviewers yourself.
That said, I think one of the risks with self published technical books like this is that they are overly credulous, and I think this book falls into that trap early by describing Kubernetes as the “cloud operating system”. Like I get it, you’re excited about Kubernetes, but making claims that all of the cloud runs on Kubernetes just undermines your work before you’ve even really started. I can’t find any public data, either academic or anecdotal, which supports the assertion that Kubernetes is even the most popular way to run workloads in clouds. I’m sure that AWS has more VMs not running Kubernetes for example than they do have running it. That said, it is clear at this point that Kubernetes is the dominant player for container clustering. So why not just say that instead?
That said, even as a fairly long term casual user of Kubernetes I learned things reading this book. For example: I didn’t know that Kubernetes now supports native webassembly (wasm) applications; or that kubectl has an explain option (although, the fact that your user interface is so horrid that you need to provide a command we last thought was a good idea in the 1980s is pretty telling).
The book provides competent introductions to the concepts you’d hope it would cover: pods; namespaces; deployments; services; ingress; and so forth, although something equally competent exists in the public documentation online. I think the value here is that they’re in bite sized morsels that I could knock over a chapter at a time during my lunch break and that built logically on top of the previous chapters.
I found the wasm chapter quite interesting, but had trouble getting its instructions to work on MacOS — its possible the rust install on my laptop is busted though, as I don’t use rust much. Then again, its also possible that wasm just isn’t ready for prime time — you need a very very new version of Docker, and custom k3s images to get the runtime to work. In the end I just gave up. Perhaps in a year or two wasm will be more real.
Honestly, the best two chapters of this book are the final two, which are an overview of the security things you should be thinking about when running Kubernetes in production. Now maybe that’s because of my current bias towards security tasks at work, but I think these chapters had good depth combined with nice tangible advice.
2024
Paperback
316
