
The Children's Illustrated Guide to Kubernetes - nslater
https://deis.com/blog/2016/kubernetes-illustrated-guide/
======
escape_goat
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
Looks like the owl took the giraffe prisoner to conduct unethical experiments
like cloning.

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

~~~
pixelglow
Cloning, coding, eh. Much the same.

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

Read the reviews here [https://www.amazon.com/Manga-Guide-Databases-Mana-
Takahashi/...](https://www.amazon.com/Manga-Guide-Databases-Mana-
Takahashi/dp/1593271905)

Then buy it direct here
[https://www.nostarch.com/mg_databases.htm](https://www.nostarch.com/mg_databases.htm)

~~~
abledon
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.

~~~
Bombthecat
Never heard about that. Time to Google it:)

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asherkin
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...](https://deis.com/images/blog-
images/kubernetes-illustrated-guide-illustration-12.png)

~~~
nslater
Thanks for catching this. Fixed!

~~~
semi-extrinsic
Typo in Kubernetes here:

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

Edit: also "ephmeral" on the Volumes drawing.

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sesteel
I kept waiting for Captain Kube to kill Phippy.

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

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Negative1
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).

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_nickwhite
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.

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

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

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

~~~
moron4hire
No, you're thinking of a dish served at Chipotle.

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

~~~
orthecreedence
Phippy is a PHP app, not a Java app.

~~~
matt_kantor
I assume that's a joke about bloat, but anyway:
[http://php.net/elephpant.php](http://php.net/elephpant.php)

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danvoell
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.

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rodionos
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.

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

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

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

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biot
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?

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

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vixen99
He meant to write "Dearest Father, whose knowledge is incomparable, what is
Kubernetes?"

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Pica_soO
Is that title a Diamond Age reference?

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

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

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heybrandons
I love this!

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asdf4life
what about Mesos?

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

~~~
nslater
Oops. Thanks for flagging that. Shrunk them.

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gm-conspiracy
Not bad.

Images were a bit oversized.

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

~~~
orthecreedence
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.

