In 2016, Deis (now part of Microsoft) platform architect Matt Butcher was looking for a way to explain Kubernetes to technical and non-technical people alike. Inspired by his daughter’s prolific stuffed animal collection, he came up with the idea of “The Illustrated Children’s Guide to Kubernetes.” Thus Phippy, the yellow giraffe and PHP application, along with her friends, were born.
Today we’re excited to welcome Phippy and the cast of snuggly, cloud native characters into CNCF. As Kubernetes continues to see unprecedented momentum, her story offers developers an easy way to explain their work to parents, friends, and children.
Today, live from the keynote stage at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America, Matt and co-author Karen Chu announced Microsoft’s donation and presented the official sequel to the Children’s Illustrated Guide to Kubernetes in their live reading of “Phippy Goes to the Zoo: A Kubernetes Story” – the tale of Phippy and her niece as they take an educational trip to the Kubernetes Zoo.
As part of Microsoft’s donation of both books and the characters Phippy, Goldie, Captain Kube, and Zee, CNCF has licensed all of this material under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY), which means that you can remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially. If you use the characters, please include the text “phippy.io” to provide attribution (and online, please include a link to https://phippy.io).
The characters were created by Matt Butcher, Karen Chu, and Bailey Beougher. Goldie is based on the Go Gopher, created by Renee French, which is also licensed under CC-BY. Images of the characters are available in the CNCF artwork repo in svg, png, and ai formats and in color, black, and white.
Now that Phippy and her cloud native friends have made CNCF their home, make sure to keep an eye out for the fun adventures the characters will find themselves on as the Kubernetes global community continues to grow!