Have you ever heard about a new technology sweeping the open source world and wished there were a crash course to help you get up to speed quickly? Or how about struggling to explain your job to family members or friends as they look on with puzzled gazes?
Scenarios like these are why Matt Butcher and Karen Chu created The Illustrated Children’s Guide to Kubernetes, in which a creative cast of characters, led by a giraffe named Phippy, explains open source technology in terms a child could understand. Since 2015, the book has evolved into a beloved series sponsored by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF)*.
When they’re not at their day jobs at Fermyon*—Butcher as founder and CEO and Chu as head of community—the duo continues to add new entries to the series. In their latest book, Phippy and friends embark on an adventure to teach people of all ages about WebAssembly (Wasm)*.
In this episode of the Open at Intel podcast, host Katherine Druckman sits down with Butcher and Chu to talk about how the series came to life, why they encouraged others in the community to create illustrated guides of their own, and why their new book focuses on Wasm.
Listen to the full episode here. The following conversation has been edited and condensed for brevity and clarity
Why Everyone is Talking About Wasm
Katherine Druckman: Before we jump into your newest book about Wasm, will you tell us how you got here?
Karen Chu: Before Fermyon, Matt and I worked together at Microsoft*, and Deis* before that, so our history spans back to 2015.
Matt Butcher: Karen and I have worked on a number of CNCF* things together, such as the illustrated guide series and the Helm* project. We’ve been involved in all kinds of projects around the cloud native ecosystem, and Wasm is just the newest and most exciting one right now.
Katherine Druckman: Could you tell us why we should be excited about Wasm?
Matt Butcher: We like to say Wasm filled a space in the cloud native ecosystem that we’ve known we've needed to fill. Virtual machines (VMs) were the technology that enabled the cloud to take off in the first place, and then along came containers, offering a great way to bundle services—things that needed to be running all the time for days, weeks, or months at a time. But we still needed a compute technology that could be spun up and executed very quickly, taking Function as a Service experiences like AWS Lambda* to the next level. In order to do that, we needed a particular security posture, ensuring the technology was secure by default. It had to be platform and architecture neutral, and of course, it had to have a really, really fast cold start time. The cold start time of a VM is a couple of minutes. The cold start time of a container is a dozen seconds or so. We were looking for a technology that could start in under 10 milliseconds. Wasm happens to be that thing. It can cold start in under a millisecond. We were looking for that kind of performance to build next-generation, serverless-driven kinds of cloud architectures, and that’s where we think Wasm shows the most promise.
Phippy’s Latest Adventure
Katherine Druckman: You’ve just released a new illustrated guide called Phippy’s Field Guide to Wasm. Can you tell us how the project came about?
Matt Butcher: This is our fourth illustrated guide. The first one came together almost by accident, but for this one, CNCF approached us and asked if we’d be interested in doing another. We knew right away that we wanted to create one about Wasm, so Karen and I grabbed a whiteboard and started brainstorming new settings and characters.
Karen Chu: We explored a few different setting ideas, but it’s funny that we landed on a camping setting. Matt’s from Colorado, and I’m originally from California, so we were able to iterate really well based on our own experiences.
Matt Butcher: Metaphors can be powerful vehicles for making complicated topics feel approachable to somebody who’s never considered them before. We started tossing around vignettes about what you do while camping—you make s’mores, you sit around the campfire and sing, you set up your tent. Karen had the idea to frame the book as a field guide. The cover art draws from bird-spotting guides and orienteering map books, and the story follows the same illustration style as the original guide.
How it All Began
Katherine Druckman: Let’s go back in time. What gave you the idea to start creating illustrated guides?
Matt Butcher: While we were working at Deis, we’d been researching how to build next-generation Platform as a Service using containers. Google* had just released Kubernetes*. My team piloted an early Kubernetes project, so I was tasked with introducing Kubernetes to the entire company—not just the engineering teams but everyone from finance to marketing. I went home and wondered how I was going to explain one of the most sophisticated orchestrators out there without making everyone fall asleep. I snapped pictures of my kid’s stuffed animals and built a presentation jokingly called, “The Illustrated Children’s Guide to Kubernetes.” So I sat up in a big, poofy chair in front of the whole company and read a presentation that was framed as a kid’s book.
Karen Chu: We originally explored turning the presentation into an illustrated video, but we didn’t have the budget, so we made a book instead, which has worked out better because we can pass the books out at conferences. We found an artist we liked on Fiverr* and transformed Matt’s slides into storyboards and then a book. We got the book out in spring of 2016 and handed out copies at the KubeCon in Berlin.
Matt Butcher: The whole process was a pretty quick turnaround. Shortly after we released the book, Deis was acquired by Microsoft. During an acquisition, you never know what from the old culture will come along to the new culture, so we were surprised that Microsoft wanted to continue the Phippy projects.
Karen Chu: Then CNCF asked us to donate the characters. We released the characters under Creative Commons* so anyone in the community can use them. There are at least four other books that the community has created outside of us. There are guides on Prometheus*, digital transformation and cloud native transformation, and recovery. It’s been cool to see how people use these characters to tell new stories. On top of that, CNCF also started encouraging graduated projects to submit their own mascot, so there are even more characters. We created Hazel the Hedgehog for Helm.
Matt Butcher: We created our second book, Phippy Goes to the Zoo, as part of our move to donate everything to CNCF. CNCF used the book to promote the launch of the series website and announced that all Phippy characters would be available on Creative Commons. We also read the book on stage at KubeCon Seattle. It was surreal to see our book displayed on giant monitors as we read to a crowd of 10,000 people. They set the stage to look like the opening page of the book. You can still watch that on YouTube. And we did our third book, From 00-K8s, with Love, while we were at Microsoft.
Karen Chu: That one’s a spy book. The characters from the previous two books play spies on a secret mission. It references the spy shows we love. The theme is security because secure supply chain was really happening in 2019.
Matt Butcher: We’re always looking for opportunities to tell a hard technology story in a fun and approachable way, and the security software supply chain was very much one of those. It was a new concept to almost everybody in the community but an important one that everyone wanted to understand. Wasm falls in the same category—people want to understand it without having to read white papers and specifications.
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About the Author
Katherine Druckman, Open Source Evangelist, Intel
Katherine Druckman, an Intel open source evangelist, hosts the podcasts Open at Intel, Reality 2.0, and FLOSS Weekly. A security and privacy advocate, software engineer, and former digital director of Linux Journal, she’s a longtime champion of open source and open standards.