The Elements of Style is a foundational guide to writing well. It effectively summarizes 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. These documents are a North Star that guides their community toward the same goals.

We need a similar guide for Kubernetes. It should set best practices for how app developers and operators should think about and use the features in Kubernetes to build and deploy reliable, stable apps. We don’t have one today, but the Kubernetes community has the experience to build one.

Drawing on his own and the community’s experiences, Aaron Schlesinger (Microsoft) details an “Elements of Kubernetes” guide, to be used by app developers and operators alike. You’ll leave with a list of best practices you can apply to your app now.

Topics include:

• Setting up your new dev-test workflow
• Building a good CI/CD pipeline
• Debugging your app in production
• Breaking up your monolithic app into microservices (and when not to do it)
• Building crash-only software

This session was recorded at the 2019 O'Reilly Software Architecture Conference in New York.