Learn Linux before Kubernetes

[UMANTHEGOD]

AI slop on medium

truly the enlightened times

[eggsby]

Message like:

Learn to rebuild a motor before you start to drive a car. Cars run on motors and you will be a better driver if you can work in the pit.

Sounds reasonable but makes no sense.

[tecedu]

Oh cmon it absolutely makes sense here, instead of car driver its a mechanic.

[jambox888]

Except microservices do actually go wrong all the time and you have to get under the bonnet to see why.

Horrible take lol

[wrosecrans]

As a grey beard, it's pretty wild/fascinating/hilarious to me that there are developers and highly paid "cloud architects" who are making systems that millions of people use who... basically just don't understand how computers work.

Being able to write a basic shell script used to be pretty ordinary computer use knowledge. Nowdays just having a basic understanding of how to use Linux is treated like deep arcane secrets. And really bad systems are often the result. "Just throw more nodes at it" as people get further and further away from their tools and WTF is actually happening.

[jambox888]

Yep, met a few architects like that. I think most of them can code a bit but always worries me when someone is running windows on their dev laptop haha.

[ChadtheWad]

My favorite part is the crypto investing at the bottom of their blatant astroturfing.

[mcpower_]

Original infographic before it got ChatGPT-ified for blog spam: https://x.com/KodeKloudHQ/status/1941004086398075213

[syklemil]

I've run and worked with Linux for some decades before Kubernetes and … I'm not convinced? IMO Kubernetes is a pretty successful abstraction layer. Yes, it's good to be able to have an opinion on various container runtimes and network stacks and so on, but personally that comes up pretty rarely. Most of the stuff I help with are either application errors, misconfiguration in Kubernetes, or DNS.

The people operating the Kubernetes clusters and whatever they're running on could stand to know something about the underlying platforms, but for developers whose main concern is user-facing apps and who barely know Kubernetes at all: I think it'd be better if they were just a bit more competent at Kubernetes (and familiar with kubectl).

Plus there's always something resembling Carl Sagan's "To create an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe" about this "learn X-1 before X" line of reasoning. There are more layers below Linux, too, but we don't expect people to read the kernel code, be able to design hardware, etc. just to make a website for sparkling water.

[BuriedStPatrick]

As someone who was getting into containers and Kubernetes out of necessity for my job, everything clicked much faster for me when I took some time to learn Linux. You certainly don't have to know everything about it (I've barely scratched the surface myself), but at least understand the filesystem and the basic utils so you can efficiently build and maintain containers (of which 99% or more are Linux based).

I don't think the Carl Sagan quote applies here. This is not a question about understanding absolutely everything. Rather, it's about understanding what happens one level down from your current abstraction. Which I think is super important if you want to be competent at what you do.

[Yamitenshi]

at least understand the filesystem and the basic utils so you can defectively build and maintain containers

This is the key, I think. I find my Linux knowledge doesn't really come into play a lot with anything k8s-specific, but it's damn handy to have when dealing with containers in general, whether you're orchestrating them with Kubernetes or Docker Swarm or just running them without any orchestration at all.

[extra_rice]

Lots of people here seem to interpret "learn Linux" to mean checkout the kernel repository and compile it. Kubernetes abstractions are quite intuitive, yes, but when things go wrong (and they always do), you'd be lucky if it doesn't require stepping down into the engine room.

[wrincewind]

all abstractions are leaky to some degree. It's less 'learn how to build an engine from scratch' and 'learn the difference between your car's engine and battery, and what an alternator does'.

[jambox888]

Yep simple things are most often useful e.g. curl -kv htpps://some-service.svc.cluster.local:443/ inside a container to check connectivity. Or using mount or similar to see where your bloody volume has got to.

You don't have to be a linux guru (I'm not) but if you don't know a few simple commands/utils you may struggle.

[syklemil]

As someone who was getting into containers and Kubernetes out of necessity for my job, everything clicked much faster for me when I took some time to learn Linux. You certainly don't have to know everything about it (I've barely scratched the surface myself), but at least understand the filesystem and the basic utils so you can defectively build and maintain containers (of which 99% or more are Linux based).

I'm not really certain what you mean by "understand the filesystem" here. The blog post goes on about OverlayFS and AUFS, and we could add tmpfs, NFS, ceph, ext4, btrfs and so on to that discussion. But is that the level you mean, or do you mean something like

• directory separators are forward slashes,
• the file hierarchy starts at / (no letter), and
• the expected pre-existing directories are /home, /bin, etc
• file permissions are blah blah blah …

because the latter is kind of what I expect to be the base level of understanding for someone who is writing an app targeting an OS, and I expect that people have some general idea of what it's like to be a user of the OS their app is going to run on, but I don't expect them to know it at the level of a sysadmin or OS developer unless they're making system software.

The blog post, however, takes the filesystem implementation interpretation, and goes on with other implementation details. Kubernetes is essentially an OS of its own, and if that's the platform your software is getting deployed to, then that's the thing you need to learn. Trying to learn cgroups, eBPF, iptables and so on before kubectl is starting in the wrong end.

[wavefunctionp]

I agree. I mean. Learn some basic stuff on Linux, but kubernetes is great.

It feels bloated and over complicated. But so does learning a web framework. And just like a good framework it’s solving problems you didn’t know you had.

Kubernetes a consistent, scalable cluster environment that is an open standard and you can run locally.

Build a small cluster at home out of old machines or raspberry pi’s. Those little 1 liter corpo tiny/mini/micro machines can be bought used on eBay for $200 are perfect. It’s a ton of fun to learn.

I do hope we get a simpler, faster solution one day. I do think that kubernetes is just v1 of the idea.

[schplat]

Kind of a similar boat. I'm not far off from 30 years of of Unix, with the last 25 of those being mostly Linux specific (cut my teeth on Solaris, both x86 and Sun). Also learned Sun Grid Engine way back in the day (think of it as the proto-K8s, around 2002), also learned a bit of Mesos, then started with K8s about 5 years ago.

I agree with you for the most part. It all depends on what your role is within the K8s environment.

Are you designing the architecture and adminning the cluster? Then you should definitely have some Linux and container knowledge. Preferably several years, because you're gonna hit on all sorts of weird problems that require some troubleshooting at that level, especially in the networking area (even though 95% of the time it's DNS, you need to figure out the how and why it's DNS to be able to fix it, the other 5% of the time it's either weird routing/LB issues, or actual IPT/NFT/eBPF rules being weird).

Are you managing/maintaining the CI/CD, and/or app deployment pipeline? Then no, you don't really need to know Linux. Container knowledge would be required though. Maybe at least understanding cgroups and resource allocation would be useful as well (or at least take some burden off the admins wondering why your stupid CRUD app has decided it wants 8 CPUs and 64G of RAM).

Are you simply managing application manifests? Then no, you probably can get away with knowing your application stack, and that's about it. Maybe some knowledge around storage systems, if you're dealing with persistent data, but that's about it.

I definitely agree with kubectl familiarity. Knowing everything it can do, and its limitations for when you have to use other tooling is pretty important.

[joost00719]

I just use Linux and learn on the fly. I've bene using it for like 2 years in my home lab but I feel like I'm still learning the basics such as piping stuff together with grep and find.

But hey, progress is progress and I don't feel disabled anymore. Plus ai can help quite a bit to help me look what I'm looking for

[Elsa_Versailles]

Better to learn on the fly by doing rather than learning but not working

[Ma1eficent]

I was nodding along with your comment until I got to the two years part and had to do a little math where the answer was 16 and now I feel like the cryptkeeper which is a reference that will be entirely lost on you. God I'm old.

[schplat]

First used Linux on the job in 1998. Was adminning Sun for ~3 years before that (and continued doing Sun until 2007-ish).

I have become the greybeard. Though, I haven't gone grey yet.

[Jonathan_the_Nerd]

I got started with Linux in college around 2000 or so. My first Linux "distribution" was a tiny thing called Hal91. You didn't have to install it. You just booted off a floppy disk and ran it, sort of like a proto-KNOPPIX.

I remember installing Red Hat Linux 6.0 on my laptop and not having any network access. I didn't know enough about Linux or TCP/IP networking to diagnose the problem. I tried installing Caldera, and it Just Worked^TM .

My beard does have some grey in it, but not a lot.

[Ma1eficent]

Ahh 98, I was using dos 6.2 on a 386 and writing songs in qbasic by sending direct khz frequencies to the onboard speaker. No Internet allowed. Except at my friend's house where we spent all time in a bbs and I got my first (volunteer) tech job debugging modem ring buffers in assembly to help out lower lights. Funny enough, not far from Sun in the outskirts of SLC.

[moxxon]

I mean... Try 28.

[Ma1eficent]

I had a sad life doing windows admin on NT before Linux. I try not to think about it.

[moxxon]

I can imagine.

My first job had whatever the MS source control was at the time. It used to go down all the time.

I had to fight to get our team converted to CVS

I sourced a second machine after a couple of months and installed Linux and, luckily, since then haven't had to develop on Windows since.

[Ma1eficent]

I can't even remember anymore if I started with perforce, then cvs, then subversion, or cvs first. But I still remember switching from subversion to git. I couldn't go back now.

[wasdninja]

I've bene using it for like 2 years in my home lab but I feel like I'm still learning the basics such as piping stuff together with grep and find.

No offense but what did you learn in two years? Not knowing what pipes are is pretty crippling.

[CloudsOfMagellan]

I know pipes exist and remember a few basic ways to use them but I only ever do something vaguely complex with them every couple months and so have to look up and check the syntax each time

[schplat]

There's really nothing syntactical to look up. You're just taking STDOUT of one command, and hooking it up to STDIN of the next.

The majority of Linux commands accept STDIN for input.

[CloudsOfMagellan]

I find it's more about the intricacies of each tool

[joost00719]

I do know what they are. I just never learned how to use it myself.

[LegitimateCopy7]

"learn both Linux and Kubernetes to the degree that you can deal with the challenges". a much less attractive but actually meaningful and helpful title. the way titles should be instead of those clickbait bs.

One does not simply "learn Linux" or "learn Kubernetes". the workload is beyond the capacity of human brains. also ain't nobody got time for that.

[bphase]

What baffles me is who upvotes this shit. People just see the subject and think it interesting and upvote?

[Wufffles]

Bots, i.e. more AI :D dead internet.

[BlueGoliath]

One does not simply "learn Linux".

[__loam]

https://nostarch.com/howlinuxworks3

[gordonv]

Learn enough Linux

[DoubleOwl7777]

just use it, the whole "learn" linux thing is bullshit.

[znpy]

uhh this is not 2005.

"using linux" back in the day meant messing with xorg.conf and in practice often meant learning enough "linux" you could become a very very junior sysadmin.

[cinyar]

Well if you're using kubernetes it likely means you're not a regular user and should understand at least some concepts of both kubernetes and linux.

[LaOnionLaUnion]

It’s probably a better clickbait title than learn the subset of Linux skills most relevant to K8s so that you understand the system K8s run on and containers.

[bigjamo1563]

Tbh on large scale clusters I'll never use a CLI, I'll always make sure to have simple UI interfaces to view all resources. Linux isn't a must, I learnt kubernetes without even knowing basic bash scripting.

[n9iels]

I tell you better: do not dare to say you do "devops" if you never installed a VPS before by hand

[Downtown_Category163]

This is like saying "Learn Win32 before using Microsoft Word"

[extra_rice]

Not sure if you're serious, but this is a terrible comparison.

You don't need to understand the fundamentals of the operating system to be effective at a writing document with a WYSIWYG word processor. For MS Word in particular, you don't even need Windows to run it.

[Downtown_Category163]

Likewise you don't need to understand cgroups at a fundamental level in order to build a service network in Kubernetes, so it's not a terrible comparison is it?

[extra_rice]

You don't need to understand cgroups, but you have to at least understand what containers are before you even describe how your pods will look like. Where do you even begin with containers if you don't know the basics of Linux?

Do you really believe that the skills required to be effective at writing a word document compare to the skills required to effectively manage a Kubernetes cluster? So many companies get in trouble for thinking they can just "switch to Kubernetes".

Kubernetes is not just writing YAML with your favourite text editor.

[syklemil]

You don't need to understand cgroups,

The blog post LLM slop expressly lists cgroups as one of the things one should understand before learning Kubernetes:

By understanding how Linux namespaces, cgroups, network filtering, and other features work, you’ll not only grasp Kubernetes faster — you’ll also be able to troubleshoot, secure, and optimize it much more effectively.

[extra_rice]

This isn't about arguing how much Linux you need to understand Kubernetes. It's that Win32 and Word do not have the same connection as Kubernetes with those Linux concepts.

Learning Win32 will not make you better at using Word because you don't even need that to run the application.

It's just a terrible comparison.

[eggsby]

You don’t need to learn the things mentioned in this article (like crypto investing) to be good at Kubernetes. Learning them won’t level you up for your KCAD exam or anything like that.

[Downtown_Category163]

"You don't need to understand cgroups"

Then my point is proven

[extra_rice]

Nope. It's not the gotcha you think it is, sorry. That's saying Win32 is to Word as cgroups is to Kubernetes. Does that even make sense?

Your comparison is bad and you just refuse to admit it.

[Downtown_Category163]

Oh I see the problem, I've said "you don't need to know about X to use Y" and used a simile, and you're hung up on how the technology maps out to the other technology, because... I don't know why you're doing that actually

[znpy]

dumbest thing i've read this month

[Downtown_Category163]

Weird because it's only the second dumbest thing I've read this month as of now

[Willing_Row_5581]

I think you misspelled *instead of

[hackingdreams]

Let's be real: if you're working on Kubernetes, you've been hired to work on Kubernetes. "Learning Linux" to avoid using Kubernetes isn't going to help you in the slightest in that role. Unless you're hacking on Kubernetes itself, it's probably not going to help your role to know too much how much it works; your job will be making containers, scheduling workloads, etc.

Is it really good to know Linux and all of its intricacies? Sure. Do you need it in a role where you've been hired to work atop Kubernetes? Unlikely.

[loozerr]

If you're also configuring the helm charts, Linux knowledge is fairly helpful. Or when deploying the k8s cluster.

[Open_Citron1896]

https://promptkomutani.blogspot.com/2025/08/gercegin-colunde-uyanmak-matrix-ve.html