Ask HN: What is the fastest way to ramp up on DevOps, k8 and GCP?

That's a really nice documentation page, however what's missing in my eyes is an example or two for each parameter in YAML format. Personally, when attempting to use Docker Swarm, things like that were immensely useful, even more so for Hashicorp Nomad and its somewhat niche HCL.

I know that people like to use something like Kustomize (https://kustomize.io/) and Helm (https://helm.sh/) at least last i checked, but it's also really nice to be able to read up on everything without necessarily following tutorials and such, or using specialized tools.

For example, with Docker Swarm, if i want to change how restarts would be handled, i have a really easy reference available: https://docs.docker.com/compose/compose-file/compose-file-v3...

But with Kubernetes, in the first linked page i find a short description (just scroll down a bit or CTRL+F "restartPolicy") which doesn't offer further parameters: https://kubernetes.io/docs/reference/generated/kubernetes-ap...

To its credit, there is a link to another page as well which contains more information: https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/workloads/pods/pod-lifec...

That said, usability wise i'd have to spend more time to figure out how to get my containers/pods restarting just once every 1 minute as opposed to whatever the default is (say, low end cluster with limited resources) with Kubernetes instead of other technologies, due to this difference.

Im very much a bottom up sort of learner so I wanted to post something I haven’t seen yet in any of these comments. Go through and build Linux from scratch https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/

You don’t have to do all of it, just enough to feel comfortable with the problem space that containers in part are trying to solve for. In doing so you will learn about the fundamentals of the stacks you are working with. Then go learn about cgroups at the lowest level. Again you don’t need to master these things but setting up a container from scratch will then give you a more intuitive understanding of what container apis like docker are trying to solve for. Install a hypervisor on your local workstation and set up a few vms networked to each other. Use a tool like netcat to talk across them. Once you have these basics, and yes it is a long and round about way, I think the cloud stuff becomes a lot easier and more approachable since you will have a more in depth understanding of what cloud providers are actually giving you in terms of configurations and managed services. I came into software development from doing sysadmin work at a NOC during a graveyard shift. So I had a lot of time on my hands to mess around with this stuff. I don’t think that tools like docker should be a substitution for the fundementals, but rather something you add to your tool belt later to make these sorts of configurations easier to set up.

Yeah this isn’t going to be a 1-2 day crash course but if you are diligent you can get a basic understanding of what these tools do in under a month. Only after you have a complete understanding of single node use case (e.g. multiple containers running on a single host) would i recommend starting to learn k8. Good luck!

* edit to fix small typos

This entirely.

And even then, I think it took our org a solid year of work from 3 dedicated engineering teams to be comfortably deploying on GKE & EKS.

And still after that investment, we ditched K8s in favor of Nomad.

Kubernetes is kind of like a steamroller where most of us are looking for a hammer.

People joke about Google releasing Kubernetes into the wild to slow down their competition. It's really not that far off from reality though.

I would suggest doing this excellent course that also includes sandbox hands-on exercises.

https://www.udemy.com/course/certified-kubernetes-administra...