Recently, I’ve been working on a tiny web application. The goal is to help a friend on a specific task, but it is also a great opportunity for me to explore new technologies. Amongst those technology is Kubernetes.

Kubernetes is a very powerful technology to manage containers. My project contains a frontend and a backend, but also a database and some RabbitMQ, which I love.

I had some experience with Docker, so dealing with containers wasn’t new to me. That said, setting-up Kubernetes means writing deployment specs in YAML and that required a lot of reading.

Should I learn Kubernetes?

One of the reason that made me choose Kubernetes over, say, docker swarm was asking one of my colleagues who is, according to another colleague, “basically a Kubernetes wizard”. He was able to answer some questions, including: “how much am I going to suffer while I learn Kubernetes?”. Spoiler alert: not much.

First, the community is amazing and incredibly helpful, which is always a good sign. I joined a Slack group with a dedicated channel for novices. Every time I got stuck on something, somebody was here to unblock me.

Additionally, the documentation is full of tutorials to get you started with your first services and deployments. They provide an interactive shell right in the browser so you don’t have to look into the installation instructions until you feel ready.

So far, so good

Kubernetes has been really pleasant to use in the past few weeks. If you’re interested and wants to get started, the talk from Sam Ghods explains at a very high level why Kubernetes is a great tool.