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Phippy and friends join the Cloud Native Computing Foundation

  • By Karen Chu, Karen Chu is a Community Manager at Azure, with a focus on Azure Container Services (AKS) and open source container-native developer tools, such as Helm, Draft, and Brigade. When she's not helping connect dots in the community, you can find her traveling and pursuing photography.

We’re so excited to share that Phippy is headed to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF)! Microsoft has donated Phippy and friends, along with our original book The Illustrated Children Guide to Kubernetes, to CNCF!

What does this mean? It means that the characters you know and love are now free to use as you start teaching others about cloud native computing. Phippy’s gone open source with all assets under the Creative Commons license. We look forward to seeing these characters continue to promote new learnings, and we encourage you to take Phippy on your own adventures!

What better way to celebrate Phippy’s new journey than with a new story? Microsoft partnered with CNCF to create a new story, and a new character, to celebrate the collaboration. As part of Microsoft’s ongoing commitment and continued support of the open source community, Matt Butcher and I are excited to share our new book – Phippy Goes to The Zoo: A Kubernetes Story!

In the new book, Aunt Phippy takes her niece Zee on a trip to the zoo, where they observe some peculiar critters. Join a loveable giraffe and a hightop-wearing zebra as they learn about Kubernetes:

Image - Phippy Goes to The Zoo: A Kubernetes Story
Brought to you by... Cloud native computing foundation and Microsoft Azure. Written by: Matt Butcher & Karen Chu Illustrated by: Bailey Beougher Designed by: Karen Chu
Image 1 - "I'm bored Aunt Phippy," Zee slouched further down on the couch. "What are we going to do today?" "Why not go see the animals?" said Phippy with a smile. "We'll go to the zoo!" "Yeah!" Zee let out a whoop and ran to find some shoes.
Image 2 - The first animals they came upon were the size of squirrels. Furry and blue, each little animal carried a tiny box as they unceasingly zipped back and forth. "Those," said Phippy, "are Pods. All day and all night, they run back and forth carrying their little containers." "Is that all they do, Aunt Phippy?" "Yup, Zee. For their entire lives, that's all the Pods do. They run."
Image 3 - Pods are the basic unit for running containers inside of Kubernetes • A Pod provides a way to set environment variables, mount storage, and feed other information into a container. In Kubernetes, Pods are responsible for running your containers. Every Pod holds at least one container, and controls the execution of that container. When the containers exit, the Pod dies too.
a number of animals in a room
Image 5 - A ReplicaSet ensures that a set of identically configured Pods are running at the desired replica count. If a Pod drops off, the ReplicaSet brings a new one online as a replacement.
Image 6 - Walking further, Zee pointed out a clump of burrows and warrens. While there were plenty of signs that the area was inhabited, neither Phippy nor Zee could see a single movement. "The Secrets are in here," said Phippy. "but you can't see them without these decoder glasses." Lee took the pair of glasses Phippy offered, slid them on, and blushed. "Oh, my. I think I'm ready to go on now, Aunt Phippy." unt Phippy. Zee handed back the glasses, and onward they went.
Image 7 - Secrets are used to store non-public information, such as tokens, certificates, or passwords. Secrets can be attached to Pods at runtime so that sensitive configuration data can be stored securely in the cluster.
Image 8 - A group of iguanas gathered near a large slingshot along the shore of a pond. An island stood in the center of the water. An iguana threw herself into the slingshot and the other iguanas launched the little beast toward the island. "The Deployments release a group onto the island. Right now, they're trying to get three out there." said Phippy. At that moment another iguana rocketed into the air but missed the island with a colossal splash in the pond. Phippy said, "If they miss, they just keep trying until they get as many as they need."
Image 9 - A Deployment is a higher-order abstraction that controls deploying and maintaining a set of Pods. Behind the scenes, it uses a ReplicaSet to keep the Pods running, but it offers sophisticated logic for deploying, updating, and scaling a set of Pods within a cluster.
Image 10 - Several stone pillars arose from a grassy knoll and at the top of each sat a vulture. As Zee and Phippy watched, one vulture spread its wings and flapped off into the distance. No sooner had one left than another took its place. Zee asked, "What are they doing?" "Those are DaemonSets, said Phippy, "They make sure to occupy every pillar, rain or shine, day or night." "I bet that if we added a new pillar, a new bird would land on it faster than you could say 'cube cuddle," chuckled Phippy.
Image 11 - DaemonSets provide a way to ensure that a copy of a Pod is running on every node in the cluster. As a cluster grows and shrinks, the DaemonSet spreads these specially labeled Pods across all of the nodes.
a close up of a piece of paper
Image 13 - Ingresses provide a way to declare that trattic ought to be channeled trom the outside of the cluster into destination points within the cluster. One single external Ingress point can accept traffic destined to many different internal services.
Image 14 - Zee pointed to the raccoons sprawled motionless in the next enclosure. "What's wrong with them?" Suddenly, one sprung to its feet, did jumping jacks, then settled back down for another nap. "Those are CronJobs," said Phippy. "Mostly, they just sleep. But periodically, they spring into action to do a specific As she spoke, another bolted upright, grabbed a broom, swept the entire enclosure, and then dropped off to sleep again. "Aunt Phippy, can I bring that one home to clean my room?" Phippy laughed as they walked on.
Image 15 - CronJobs provide a method for scheduling the execution of Pods. They are excellent for running periodic asks like backups, reports, and automated tests.
Image 16 - Zee halted abruptly. In the distance, a black-railed fence arose. The arches above the pen were marked C-R-D Between the bars, Zee could make out some peculiar critters. A giraffe with a hippopotamus head. A snake with raccoon ears. A lion with a beaver's tail. A unicorn with no horn. Zee wasn't sure she liked the looks of that place. "Oh," said Phippy, a look of concern on her face, "Uh…... look! It's lunch time! We'd better head home." With a look of mild relief, Zee complied. "Can we stop at Captain Kube's Shake Shop on the way out?"
Image 17 - CustomResourceDefinitions, or CRDs, provide an extension mechanism that cluster operators and developers can use to create their own resource types.
Image 18 - Zee you later
Image 19 - A flying dragon


If you’re interested in learning more about Kubernetes on Azure, check out http://aka.ms/LearnAKS and try AKS here.

Download a copy of the book from Microsoft here.

You can visit Phippy and friends at their new CNCF website: https://phippy.io.

a close up of a woman
Karen Chu
Karen Chu is a Community Manager at Azure, with a focus on Azure Container Services (AKS) and open source container-native developer tools, such as Helm, Draft, and Brigade. When she's not helping connect dots in the community, you can find her traveling and pursuing photography.

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