| I set up a K8S cluster from scratch using the CoreOS tutorials and several other articles (like Kubernetes From the Ground Up series). What's missing is this: 1. Architecture for your specific needs. This is a design process and not easily condensed into a tutorial. It still requires critical thinking on the part of the designer. 2. How the different components fit together and why they matter. For (1) to be commoditized, there needs to be sufficient number of installs where people try different things and come up with a best practices that the community discovers. There are not enough of that for that to take place. For example, I put brought up a production cluster on AWS. I also had to decide how this was all going to interact with AWS VPS and availability zones. How do I get AWS ELB to talk to the cluster? The automated scripts are only the starting point because they assume a certain setup, and I wanted to know what the consequences of those are. This is where the consultants and systems design comes in. On the other hand, Kesley Hightower probably has a lot of that knowledge in his head. By getting it out there, I think more people will try this, understand the principles, and collectively, we'll start seeing these best practices emerge. Maybe Hightower will eventually write a book. In the meantime, if you want to know how to design and deploy a custom setup, you do need to know the building blocks, how they are put together, and how you can compose them in a way for specific use-cases. It's no different than choosing a framework, like Rails or Phoenix, and then learning how to compose things that the framework offers you in order to do what you need to do. You get that knowledge from playing with it and experimenting. Having said all of that, while I'm glad I do have a good foundation for Kubernetes, if I want to use it in production, I'm probably just going to use GKE. |