Over the past couple of years I have become a big fan of podcasts. They are a great way to help pass the time while working out, doing chores around the house, traveling, or general background filler.
Podcasts can be entertaining like with How Did This Get Made, which gives hilarious reviews and commentary on bombastic movies, informative like with the New York Times The Daily, or even help you learn a new language. I listen to a number of tech podcasts as well. For my role as a developer advocate, tech podcasts help to keep me informed on trends and practices of the industry and even get in-depth on a specific technology or practice.
Kubernetes has become an incredibly popular topic to learn about in the years since it was introduced. However in my experience with Kubernetes it can be difficult to know where to get started as it is covering a lot of different concerns. In this article we will look at three podcast episodes each of which take a different approach to covering Kubernetes; first a high level overview of Kubernetes, why it was created and what problems it’s trying to address, a second that gets hands and technical with some of the core concepts of Kubernetes, and finally a podcast that gives a look as to what it’s like to run Kubernetes in production. With that let’s get started.
Getting a High Level Understanding of Kubernetes
My first podcast recommendation is of my friend Josh Long‘s podcast A Bootiful Podcast. In an April 2020 episode Josh interviewed Joe Beda, one of the co-creators of Kubernetes.
This episode of A Bootiful Podcast does a great job of laying out why Kubernetes exists and the goals of the project. In the episode Josh and Joe talk about the history of Kubernetes, originally developed by Google and built off of lessons learned from developing Borg, which is the cluster manager Google developed and still largely uses internally.
If you have been hearing about Kubernetes and wondering if it makes sense to introduce at your organization, this would be a great place to start. You can listen to this episode of A Bootiful Podcast here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/kubernetes-co-creator-joe-beda/id1438691771?i=1000470441020
Kubernetes Nuts & Bolts
If you want to get a bit more hands on understanding of Kubernetes, then you should definitely check out Java Pub House. Also in an April 2020 episode, Freddy Guime and Bob Paulin, dig into the core concepts and features of Kubernetes.
I have long enjoyed Java Pub House because Freddy and Bob do a great job of breaking down complex technical concepts into an easy to understand format. Their episode on Kubernetes was no different as they cover containers, pods, services, networking within a Kubernetes cluster, and other key concepts. While I have been doing a crash course on Kubernetes over about the past two years, I still learned a number of new things from listening to this episode. So even if you already have some hands on experience with Kubernetes, this episode of Java Pub House is still worth a listen.
You can listen to Java Pub House‘s episode of Kubernetes here on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/episode-89-kubernetes-oh-container-orchestration/id467641329?i=1000471313601
Kubernetes in the Wild
Understanding the high level overview and history of Kubernetes is great, and getting hands on can help you setup a proof-of-concept Kubernetes cluster, but nothing can match that day-to-day lived experience of running Kubernetes in production. Which is what we get in a February 2020 episode of Software Defined Talk, when Michael Coté interviewed Charles Lowell on his experience of working with Kubernetes in production.
I found this episode deeply interesting. As mentioned above, I have been learning about Kubernetes for about the past two years, and while I can see the potential of Kubernetes, my practical experience of running Kubernetes on production workloads is limited. So hearing Charles talk about his experience of using Kubernetes to run production workloads was helpful. Coté does a great job of keeping the interviewed grounded for people who are still learning about Kubernetes themselves.
If you want to listen to this episode of Software Defined Talk you can check it out at this link on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/episode-218-kubernetes-for-developers-with-charles-lowell/id893738521?i=1000465636468
Conclusion
Podcasts can be a great opportunity to learn about the current trends and practices in software development. Technologies like Kubernetes are very complex and at times difficult to understand because they are trying to address many different problems; load balancing, ease of deployment, networking, etc.. These three podcast episodes do a great job of explaining Kubernetes at three different levels and I would highly recommend checking not only these episodes of the respective podcasts, but consider subscribing as well as each have podcast has a number of great and informative episodes.
Billy Korando 