Preface

As is probably true for many of you reading this book, I started out in the technology industry as a systems administrator for Linux and UNIX systems and networks. Also, like many, I was never satisfied with the levels of (and confidence in) automation available to me. Some of us worked with things like CFEngine, Puppet, and Chef, to manage more with less and to do more serious engineering and less “systems janitoring” with our technology. Then containers became popular, and CoreOS was launched to bridge the gap between containers and systems administration at scale.

I began using CoreOS in late 2013 when it was just getting started. It was the OS that most systems admins knew had to exist eventually: an integrated way to orchestrate services as an abstraction from the pool of compute resources they run on. Manning reached out to me in late 2015 to see if I was interested in writing a CoreOS book, and I pulled together a proposal and started writing. I also began to feel guilty doing anything other than writing when I had spare time without my kids around. This is my first book, and I’ve discovered that coming up with the content and typing it in Vim isn’t the hardest part: it’s finding the magic alignment of motivated book-writing time and uninterrupted free time. These things rarely happen at once, especially when you have young kids.

I hope this book informs and challenges you. The progression of this book, in a way, follows the progression of my career and the progression of this slice of technology. Specifically, CoreOS and systems like it are intended to turn mundane operations work into software development, and to turn sysadmin firefighting into declarative engineering. So, this book begins with nuts and bolts, and ends with a complete software stack.