Over the Christmas holidays in 2016, I sat down to learn Kubernetes. I was soon to join the Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) team and needed to learn how this platform worked—and quickly. I’d previously used several Platform as a Service (PaaS) environments to deploy stateless applications in a scalable way, and I was excited by the opportunity that Kubernetes presented: the flexibility to run anything you could package in a container paired with the versatility of various workload constructs from stateless to stateful applications and batch jobs. Like many, perhaps, I found there was a bit of a learning curve when starting out.
By early 2017, I’d gained some knowledge and was now a product manager on the GKE team, interacting frequently with developers. One such developer was my brother, who was migrating his startup from a PaaS to Kubernetes. I was able to share everything I’d learned so far and hopefully helped him skip some of the newbie mistakes I made. But I wished there was a simpler way to transfer this knowledge: content specifically written for the application developer who wants to deploy onto a production-grade system without needing to learn the whole system at the outset.