ansible for kubernetes

Last month I announced I was going to make my books Ansible for DevOps and Ansible for Kubernetes available free on LeanPub through the end of March, so people who are in self-isolation and/or who have lost their jobs could level up their automation skills.

The response floored me—in less than two weeks, I had given away over 40,000 copies of the two books, and they jumped to the top of LeanPub's bestseller lists.

Purchases (over 99% with price set to 'free') of both books spiked within hours of the announcement.

March 31st Update: Through Device42's generosity, this offer's been extended through the month of April!

The ongoing Coronavirus/COVID-19 pandemic and bear market made me realize how beneficial it has been to be adaptable in the tech industry. There are no guarantees in life, and the ability to earn a livelihood is probably the most underrated important aspect of overall health. Most people take it for granted until they are deeply affected by it.

I can't do much to help during this crises, but I figure that I can make my two books, Ansible for DevOps and Ansible for Kubernetes, free for anyone who wants to learn a new skillset as a buffer against possible coming layoffs.

Five years ago, I set out to write a book. For a topic, I picked Ansible, since I was familiar with the software, and noticed there weren't any other books about it. I struck gold with Ansible for DevOps, and have since sold over 22,000 copies between eBook and paperback copies.

I've written about self-publishing before, and my opinion about publishing technical works is stronger than ever:

• Don't write for a publisher (usually)
• Use the Lean Publishing process

I wrote an entire article (Self-Publish, don't write for a Publisher) on the first topic. Regarding the second topic, I see writing a technical book on the same plane as building a software project:

Kubernetes is taking over the world of infrastructure management, at least for larger-scale operations, and best practices have started to solidify. One of those best practices is the cultivation of Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs) to describe your applications in a Kubernetes-native way, and Operators to manage your the Custom Resources running on your Kubernetes clusters.

In the Drupal community, Kubernetes uptake has been somewhat slow, but is on the rise. Just like with Docker adoption for local development, the tooling and documentation has been slowly percolating. For example, Tess Flynn from TEN7 has been boldly going where no one has gone before (oops, wrong scifi series!) using the Force to promote Drupal usage in a Kubernetes environment.

Since 2014, I've been working for Acquia, doing some fun work with a great team in Professional Services. I started out managing some huge Drupal site builds for Acquia clients, and ended up devoting all my time for the past couple years to some major infrastructure projects, diving deeper into operations work, Ansible, AWS, Docker, and Kubernetes in production.

In that same time period, I began work on my second book, Ansible for Kubernetes, but have not had the dedicated time to get too deep into writing—especially now that I have three young kids. When I started writing Ansible for DevOps, I had one newborn!

AnsibleFest 2018 is in the books, and it was a great conference! I was able to attend the 'Contributors Summit' in Austin on Monday, and remotely Thursday, and I learned quite a bit! I also presented Make your Ansible playbooks maintainable, flexible, and scalable on both days of the conference. Slides from that session are available below, but you'll have to wait for the actual video to be uploaded to see the fun little gimmick I added for the live presentation ?.