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CoreOS in Action
To be competitive, an organization needs to reach modern standards of scalability and high availability. While Linux is an option, it's painful to deal with the frequent operating system updates and complex configuration management. Docker, a popular container system, can reduce these manual system administration tasks. While plenty of Linux distributions support Docker, they do not handle large scale production. This is where CoreOS can help. CoreOS is an operating system designed from the ground up to facilitate container use at any scale.
CoreOS in Action begins by introducing the core components, how services run in CoreOS, and the big picture of how the parts fits together. Next, readers learn how to fire up their own CoreOS cluster. Readers learn how to configure their local environment, the basics of CoreOS system administration, and follow an application deployment example. It covers how to take advantage of CoreOS's high availability and fault tolerance as well as how to plan application architecture. The book also covers operational planning for CoreOS, deployment options, and how to deal with mass storage. Readers will discover end-to-end deployment of CoreOS in Amazon Web Services, and learn from real-world examples of application stacks.
Purchase of the print book includes a free eBook in PDF, Kindle, and ePub formats from Manning Publications.
CoreOS in Action begins by introducing the core components, how services run in CoreOS, and the big picture of how the parts fits together. Next, readers learn how to fire up their own CoreOS cluster. Readers learn how to configure their local environment, the basics of CoreOS system administration, and follow an application deployment example. It covers how to take advantage of CoreOS's high availability and fault tolerance as well as how to plan application architecture. The book also covers operational planning for CoreOS, deployment options, and how to deal with mass storage. Readers will discover end-to-end deployment of CoreOS in Amazon Web Services, and learn from real-world examples of application stacks.
Purchase of the print book includes a free eBook in PDF, Kindle, and ePub formats from Manning Publications.
200 pages, Paperback
Published June 4, 2017
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
August 28, 2017
I feel bad giving this book a low rating, because it doesn't entirely deserve it. It's an unfortunate product of trying to write a book about an emerging technology, at the same time it's evolving. Very shortly after this books release the CoreOS team moved away from fleetctl to Kubernetes based management. Making a large part of this book out of date basically on arrival.
That could even be forgiven (you can always run the older "stable" build), but the main reason I've marked this so low is the examples are bad, if not outright wrong.
What I really want in a book about emerging tech is something that brings clarity to the noise generated by opinion posts, outdated blog tutorials, and all that. I expect a physically printed book to be a cut above all that.
So here's the object example of my issue: one of the first meat-and-potatoes chapters goes through getting a cluster running with Vagrant. The introduction to Vagrant is brief, but in not really here for that, so not a big deal. It skips how you would get setup on Linux past the usual "use your package manager", and honestly, I'm used to it, not going to knock that. It takes a while before I'm running between some local Ruby environment issues and Linux specific config issues; but fleetctl isn't working in my cluster.
I start re-reading the section paying extreme attention. I can't find what I'm doing wrong. So now I look at the readme for the project this chapter has me using, "maybe something's changed". The readme suggests pretty different steps. So I try it's way, no dice. I lose more hours this way. Eventually I realize there's a link to the CoreOS doc page, which shows yet a third way to get this running. There's no agreement on how to get this working, and they're all wrong to boot. Not one of these guides has it right.
The short version is, I expect a book I pay for to be above all this. I still couldn't get the readme or doc pages version to work, but they got me closer than this book, and I didn't pay money for them. Based on the form for this book on Manning's website, a second version is already in the works.
The second edition could do a lot better; unfortunately the first edition feels rushed, under reviewed, and poorly edited.
That could even be forgiven (you can always run the older "stable" build), but the main reason I've marked this so low is the examples are bad, if not outright wrong.
What I really want in a book about emerging tech is something that brings clarity to the noise generated by opinion posts, outdated blog tutorials, and all that. I expect a physically printed book to be a cut above all that.
So here's the object example of my issue: one of the first meat-and-potatoes chapters goes through getting a cluster running with Vagrant. The introduction to Vagrant is brief, but in not really here for that, so not a big deal. It skips how you would get setup on Linux past the usual "use your package manager", and honestly, I'm used to it, not going to knock that. It takes a while before I'm running between some local Ruby environment issues and Linux specific config issues; but fleetctl isn't working in my cluster.
I start re-reading the section paying extreme attention. I can't find what I'm doing wrong. So now I look at the readme for the project this chapter has me using, "maybe something's changed". The readme suggests pretty different steps. So I try it's way, no dice. I lose more hours this way. Eventually I realize there's a link to the CoreOS doc page, which shows yet a third way to get this running. There's no agreement on how to get this working, and they're all wrong to boot. Not one of these guides has it right.
The short version is, I expect a book I pay for to be above all this. I still couldn't get the readme or doc pages version to work, but they got me closer than this book, and I didn't pay money for them. Based on the form for this book on Manning's website, a second version is already in the works.
The second edition could do a lot better; unfortunately the first edition feels rushed, under reviewed, and poorly edited.
April 9, 2018
The book lost its purpose almost the time it was released.
Having CoreOS fleet being deprecated a month before the book was released is definitely a huge blow to the book. 1 year later - fleet is removed from any dependency channels and is totally obsolete.
I've *wasted* 2-3 hours trying to get a working environment with the coreos-vagrant github project, rkt and fleet. In the end I had a working environment without fleet cause everything was a nightmare to setup.
So I proceeded to finish the book end-to-end with all the examples and I can say that it was still pointless to me. To people already familiar with software engineering (in general), devops (in general), etcd, Docker, systemd and Linux the book serves no value.
The only thing that interested me in the CoreOS stack was rkt, fleet and Tectonic. Unfortunately Tectonic and rkt are not of importance to the book. I understand the turn of events that resulted in fleet becoming dead, but in my opinion Manning publishing and the author, Matt Bailey, should've taken the hit and scrapped all the samples with fleet and instead migrated to Tectonic/Kubernetes equivalents.
The applications and samples are heavily focused on Docker, migrating them to Kubernetes manifests and introducing Tectonic would've saved the book.
In the end, I learnt nothing from this book. In the struggles to get a working environment for the book, I learnt a bit more about CoreOS, rkt, Container Linux config transpiler (ct) and fleet. Either way I am fairly certain I can't really trust in these tools in the near future to be used in a production environment under my supervision.
Having CoreOS fleet being deprecated a month before the book was released is definitely a huge blow to the book. 1 year later - fleet is removed from any dependency channels and is totally obsolete.
I've *wasted* 2-3 hours trying to get a working environment with the coreos-vagrant github project, rkt and fleet. In the end I had a working environment without fleet cause everything was a nightmare to setup.
So I proceeded to finish the book end-to-end with all the examples and I can say that it was still pointless to me. To people already familiar with software engineering (in general), devops (in general), etcd, Docker, systemd and Linux the book serves no value.
The only thing that interested me in the CoreOS stack was rkt, fleet and Tectonic. Unfortunately Tectonic and rkt are not of importance to the book. I understand the turn of events that resulted in fleet becoming dead, but in my opinion Manning publishing and the author, Matt Bailey, should've taken the hit and scrapped all the samples with fleet and instead migrated to Tectonic/Kubernetes equivalents.
The applications and samples are heavily focused on Docker, migrating them to Kubernetes manifests and introducing Tectonic would've saved the book.
In the end, I learnt nothing from this book. In the struggles to get a working environment for the book, I learnt a bit more about CoreOS, rkt, Container Linux config transpiler (ct) and fleet. Either way I am fairly certain I can't really trust in these tools in the near future to be used in a production environment under my supervision.
June 20, 2017
It's one of these books that don't attack the reader with too much theory or tons of syntax. Instead to guides you through quite practical (honestly) examples & how they are (supposed to be) implemented. In theory it's all ok (especially as, like I said, sample scenarios aren't too trivial), but even if the idea was superb, execution (somehow) has failed.
Clearly devil is in the details & author has failed with emphasizing key topics or concepts - I had a feeling of (rather dull) reading through config samples that in general were rather easy to follow, but failed to build a reliable image of full CoreOS capabilities. I don't know whether I know 20% of CoreOS specifics or 80% of it. I know basics about sidekicks, but do I really know any sort of holistic concept behind them? Would I tinker out where to use them exactly & where not to? Not really. This book is good for nodding - "OK, it makes sense; OK, I can imagine this syntax causing this effect", but is not really enough to start working with CoreOS on your own.
Frankly, I was a bit disappointed.
Clearly devil is in the details & author has failed with emphasizing key topics or concepts - I had a feeling of (rather dull) reading through config samples that in general were rather easy to follow, but failed to build a reliable image of full CoreOS capabilities. I don't know whether I know 20% of CoreOS specifics or 80% of it. I know basics about sidekicks, but do I really know any sort of holistic concept behind them? Would I tinker out where to use them exactly & where not to? Not really. This book is good for nodding - "OK, it makes sense; OK, I can imagine this syntax causing this effect", but is not really enough to start working with CoreOS on your own.
Frankly, I was a bit disappointed.
March 4, 2017
The reason I approached this book was to have an overview of CoreOS, this book goes beyond that which is great for someone that wants to apply CoreOS.
It is examples oriented as the title suggests and the author seems to have a good overall view, it's a subject that you only seem to absorb the content if you practice.
It is examples oriented as the title suggests and the author seems to have a good overall view, it's a subject that you only seem to absorb the content if you practice.
August 15, 2018
It should have been a good introduction book on the subject for me. At the end, I must admit that I miss affinity for all matters about "system". Therefore, this book miss the target for me. It doesn't mean it's a but one, but not one for me.
Ma note de lecture en Français ici
Ma note de lecture en Français ici
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews