Phippy

Phippy is the yellow giraffe from The Illustrated Children's Guide to Kubernetes, a picture book that Deis platform architect Matt Butcher wrote with Karen Chu in 2016 after noticing his daughter's stuffed animals could stand in for cloud native concepts. Illustrator Bailey Beougher gave her the spots, and the first printed copies went out at KubeCon London that spring. When Microsoft acquired Deis in 2017 the book and its cast came along, and in December 2018 the characters were donated outright to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. CNCF put Phippy and friends under a CC BY licence, kept the series going with titles like Phippy Goes to the Zoo, and grew the circle into a menagerie with a character for nearly every project in the cloud native landscape. A children's book turned out to be better developer marketing than a whitepaper.