KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2017

“The Elements of Style” is one of the most important and foundational guidelines on how to write well. It has effectively summarized, in a list of seminal guidelines, how to harness the power of the English language to write high quality prose of almost any kind.

In computing, we have similar guides for various technologies. Python offers “The Zen Of Python”, Ruby has “The Rails Doctrine”, and so on...

One of the powers these documents wield is that they help serve as a “north star” that guides an entire community toward the same goals.

I believe we need a similar guide for Kubernetes. It would describe how app developers and operators should think about and use the features in Kubernetes to build and deploy reliable, stable apps. Armed with such a guide, we could all hope to better understand the “essence” of Kubernetes in pursuit of building better cloud native apps.

We don’t have anything like this today, but many in the Kubernetes community have strong, detailed opinions for what should go in this guide. Much of it is tribal knowledge or scattered in blog posts.

In this talk, I’ll try to bring many of these opinions together and lay out an “Elements of Kubernetes” guide for app developers and operators alike. I’ll do so by relating each “element” to stories and details I’ve seen in the community that reveal what makes a good Kubernetes and cloud native app.