Afterword
There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.
Niccolò Machiavelli
Well, that was quite a ride. We’ve covered a lot in this book, but everything we’ve included has been determined by one simple principle: we think you need to know it if you’re using Kubernetes in production.
They say an expert is just somebody who’s one page ahead in the manual. It’s quite likely that, if you’re reading this book, you will be the Kubernetes expert for your organization, at least at first. We hope you’ll find this manual useful, but it’s only a starting point.
Where to Go Next
You may find these resources useful, both for learning more about Kubernetes and cloud native, and for keeping up with the latest news and developments:
- http://slack.k8s.io/
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The official Kubernetes Slack organization. This is a good place to ask questions, and chat with other users.
- https://discuss.kubernetes.io/
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A public forum for discussing all things Kubernetes.
- https://kubernetespodcast.com/
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A weekly podcast put together by Google. Episodes usually run about 20 minutes and cover weekly news and usually interview someone involved with Kubernetes.
- https://github.com/heptio/tgik
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TGIK8s is a weekly live video stream, started by Joe Beda at Heptio. The format usually involves about an hour of live demoing something in the Kubernetes ecosystem. All videos are archived and available to watch on-demand.
Not to be left out, we have a blog associated with this book that you may like to read. Check in every so often to see the latest news, updates, and blog posts about Cloud Native DevOps.
Here are some email newsletters you might like to subscribe to, covering topics like software development, security, DevOps, and Kubernetes:
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KubeWeekly (curated by the CNCF)
Welcome Aboard
We learn nothing from being right.
Elizabeth Bibesco
Your first priority on your Kubernetes journey should be to spread your expertise as widely as you can—and to learn as much as you can from others. None of us knows everything, but everybody knows something. Together, we just might figure things out.
And don’t be afraid to experiment. Make your own demo app, or borrow ours, and try things with it that you’re likely to need in production. If everything you do works perfectly, then you’re not experimenting enough. Real learning comes from failures, and from trying to figure out what’s wrong and fix them. The more you fail, the more you learn.
To the extent that we’ve learned anything about Kubernetes, it’s because we’ve failed a lot. We hope you will too. Have fun!