It seems that with each new book the scope gets fuzzier and less precise. When I started writing Test-Driven Java Development the scope of the whole book was done in advance. I had a team working with me. We defined the index and a short description of each chapter. From there on we worked on a schedule as most technical authors do. Then I started writing the second book. The scope was more obscure. I wanted to write about DevOps practices and processes and had only a very broad idea what will be the outcome. I knew that Docker had to be there. I knew that configuration management is a must. Microservices, centralized logging, and a few other practices and tools that I used in my projects were part of the initial scope. For that book I had no one behind me. There was no team but me, a lot of pizzas, an unknown number of cans of Red Bull, and many sleepless nights. The result is The DevOps 2.0 Toolkit: Automating the Continuous Deployment Pipeline with Containerized Microservices. With the third book, the initial scope became even more obscure. I started writing without a plan. It was supposed to be about cluster management. After a couple of months of work, I attended DockerCon in Seattle where we were presented with the new Docker Swarm Mode. My immediate reaction was to throw everything I wrote to trash and start over. I did not know what will the book be about except that it must be something about Docker Swarm. I was impressed with the new design. Something about Swarm ended up being The DevOps 2.1 Toolkit: Docker Swarm: Building, testing, deploying, and monitoring services inside Docker Swarm clusters. While working on it, I decided to make DevOps Toolkit Series. I thought that it would be great to record my experiences from different experiments, and from working with various companies and open source projects. So, naturally, I started thinking and planning the third installment in the series; The DevOps Toolkit 2.2. The only problem is that, this time, I truly don't have a clue what will it be about. One idea was to do a deep comparison of different schedulers (for example, Docker Swarm, Kubernetes, and Mesos/Maraton). The another was to explore serverless. Even though it is a terrible name (there are servers, we just don't manage them), it is a great subject. The ideas kept coming but there was no clear winner. So, I decided not to define the scope. Instead, I defined some general objectives.
