Enterprise cloud native transformation is challenging. There are many moving parts - people, processes, and technologies - that need to come together for successful transformation. Among these, putting people at the center of transformation is key.

At the recent KubeCon Europe, KBE Insider had the opportunity to interview Sebastian Kister, who leads the Container Competence Center at Audi AG. During the interview, Sebastian shared how he approaches enterprise cloud native transformation by focusing on people and enablement.

A Transformation Mindset

Sebastian has a background in startups, where he gained experience building scalable solutions and a transformation mindset. He brought these experiences to Audi, where he started building a Kubernetes platform to assist development teams in securely deploying their workloads. His team grew from 3 to 14 members over the years, and now consults various platform teams on how to build and run infrastructure and business integration layers.

Scaling Transformation

Currently, Audi has over 6600 applications that run on-prem, public cloud, and hybrid environments. To scale transformation across these applications, Sebastian's team takes a people-centered approach. Instead of forcing changes through rigid processes and tools, they enable passionate team members to choose the right technologies to solve problems. They then help teams build automation around these technologies, which in turn shapes natural processes. By solving actual problems first, they are able to create solutions that address teams' needs and have high adoption.

Respecting Silos and Enabling Collaboration

Sebastian acknowledges that silos are natural ways for large organizations to organize themselves. Instead of fighting them, his team respects silos but works to enable cross-silo collaboration. They talk to developers and connect them directly to infrastructure teams, bypassing rigid middle layers. They also provide hands-on guidance to help development teams gain skills and confidence in using new technologies. Over time, teams become proficient and require less support, allowing Sebastian's small team to scale their impact.

An Education-First Approach

Education and enablement are key to Sebastian's people-first approach. His team guides the development teams with the cloud native technologies and skills they need to work independently. They start by understanding teams' business goals, then advise them on the best paths to achieve those goals using technologies like Kubernetes, AWS, and Azure. While some lift-and-shift migrations may make sense, most of the work they consult on involves new cloud native applications.

Driving Transformation Through People

By focusing on people, education, and enablement, Sebastian and his team are able to drive cloud native transformation at Audi without enforcing strict rules and processes. They scale their impact through passionate team members and by empowering development teams to solve their own problems in an automated, scalable way. Their people-first approach complements technologies and platforms, and allows Audi to transform at an enterprise scale. Overall, for any organization undertaking cloud native transformation, putting people at the center and investing in their enablement is key to success.

This aligns with KBE Insider's mission of highlighting leaders who are driving transformation through people enablement and education. KBE Insider is proud to bring to you interviews with key contributors in the open source and cloud native space. Our KBE Insider Amsterdam and KBE Insider Detroit series feature conversations with leaders like Sebastian who are enabling transformation from the ground up. We also frequently update our community contributors page to recognize the effort of those building and strengthening the cloud native community. Through these initiatives, we aim to amplify voices and share insights from those at the forefront of innovation. Make sure to visit KBE Insider for the latest stories of people driving change. Transformation requires many parts - but it starts with passionate individuals empowering teams from within.

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Enterprise cloud native transformation is challenging. There are many moving parts - people, processes, and technologies - that need to come together for successful transformation. Among these, putting people at the center of transformation is key.

At the recent KubeCon Europe, KBE Insider had the opportunity to interview Sebastian Kister, who leads the Container Competence Center at Audi AG. During the interview, Sebastian shared how he approaches enterprise cloud native transformation by focusing on people and enablement.

By Savitha Raghunathan

I had the opportunity to attend KubeCon again this year and was super excited as I had the chance to finally meet with our KBE Insider host and Clinical Assistant Professor of Computing and Data Sciences at Boston University, Langdon White. For some of you who may not know, I’m part of the rotating co-host bench for KBE Insider, our monthly live streaming show where we interview the movers and shakers of the Kubernetes community, highlight open source tools, and keep you all updated on what’s new with Kubernetes and the Cloud Native community. I also contribute to the Konveyor ecosystem, which is helping companies modernize their application workloads safely and at scale. I had so much fun in the KBE branded Mustang Mach-E Ford Motor Company let us borrow to film our car interviews in Detroit while at KubeCon! Tune in as I update Langdon on the Konveyor project, my community involvement with Kubernetes, and how the learnings from community participation are transferable from one open source project to another.

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Konveyor is now a CNCF Sandbox Project

ICYMI, the Konveyor project is now officially a CNCF sandbox project and I couldn’t be more excited for the opportunity to build this community! We ran a workshop at OpenShift Commons Gathering while in Detroit for KubeCon North America and we received great feedback on the Konveyor project. Shout-out to everyone who attended and shout-out to Fabian von Feilitzsch and Daniel Oh, who co-presented with me. We’re looking forward to another workshop in Amsterdam for KubeCon Europe! 

CNCF sandbox acceptance for the Konveyor project opens a huge opportunity to be at the forefront of building a large collaborative community for the open source community to advance the industry as a whole. To stay on top of the Konveyor updates and to participate in the community, join the Konveyor community google group. 

Lane-Assist System for Your Application Modernization Journey

As more companies have embarked on their cloud migration journey for workloads, they need a vendor-neutral solution that can safely modernize their applications. Konveyor assists with adopting Kubernetes at scale by providing in-depth analysis and assessment of the application, remediations for issues found during the analysis phase, and effort estimation. 

If you are interested in learning more, get started with the Konveyor learning path available in KBE and look out for future updates!

Savitha Raghunathan updates us on Konveyor and what it means to be an official CNCF Sandbox Project. Tune in and learn more about the Konveyor project and how you can contribute.

Last month at KubeCon, we caught up with the Co-founder and CTO at Run:ai, Ronen Dar, as we took a car ride (thank you Ford Motor Company for providing us with the Mustang Mach-E!) with KBE Insider host and Clinical Assistant Professor of Computing and Data Sciences at Boston University, Langdon White, on the roads of Detroit. Run:ai is solving the problem of GPU utilization, an expensive resource when it comes to running AI/ML workloads, by offering an orchestration platform allowing AI/ML teams full visibility and automated GPU scheduling capabilities.

Ronen talks about scheduling capabilities from the high-performance computing (HPC) world that was missing with Kubernetes and so Run:ai built it and now they’re running full speed to help AI/ML teams better utilize their GPU resources while benefiting from everything Kubernetes offers. 

Watch the full interview and hear more from Ronen as he explains more about the benefits of Kubernetes and the problem Run:ai solves.

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Open Source Tools to Help Run Efficient AI/ML Workloads

Ronen mentions the importance of giving back to the Kubernetes community, a theme we heard from our interviews at KubeCon. 

If you find yourself “hugging GPUs” as Ronen references in the car interview, here are a couple of open source projects Run:ai offers that we think can help with your AI/ML transformation:

• genv (GPU Environment Management) - provision your GPUs without code changes 
• rntop - monitor GPUs across a cluster (look out for future native installs for Linux distros)

ICYMI, Run:ai had two engineers, Natasha Romm and Raz Rotenberg presenting at Kubernetes AI Day, one of the co-located events prior to KubeCon North America, on the GPU utilization challenge and the open source tools Run:ai provides. Check out the recording from KubeCon, “Are You Really Out of GPUs? How to Better Understand Your GPU Utilization”. 

Get started with AI/ML on Kubernetes

Want to learn more? Kube by Example (KBE) offers a free AI/ML with Jupyter on Kubernetes learning path. Shout-out to Kaitlyn Abdo and Josh Wood for contributing! At KBE we’re committed to keeping KBE content updated and relevant. If you would like to contribute or have suggestions, reach out to us, we’re always open to feedback! 

• Leave anonymous feedback
• DM us @kubebyexample
• Join the discussion on the KBE community forum

At KubeCon we caught up with Run:ai Co-founder and CTO Ronen Dar and took a car ride (thank you Ford Motor Company!) with KBE Insider host Langdon White.

Another car ride in Detroit with KBE Insider Host and Clinical Assistant Professor of Computing and Data Sciences at Boston University, Langdon White, behind the wheel while at KubeCon last month with Christian Hernandez, Sr. Principal Product Manager at Red Hat. We catch up with Christian on what he’s been up to on an early morning ride in Detroit in an awesome Mustang Mach-E our friends at Ford Motor Company let us borrow all week at KubeCon! Watch the full episode and let us know what you think about GitOps! 

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So how did we get from DevOps to GitOps? Christian breaks it down as, “DevOps is the culture and GitOps is how that culture looks like in practice.” That’s an excellent way to put it. 

As more organizations adopt a DevOps culture, they are realizing the value in expediting the development process and delivering products faster, more automated, and more secure. To implement this cultural shift, organizations need to consider the various tools and workflows to build the framework for their GitOps practice.

Resources to get you started with GitOps!

At KubeCon last month we released two new additions to our learning paths for Kuby by Example (KBE). Let’s get started - from “zero to smoothie” as Christian says! (go watch the episode if you don’t get it!) 

Argo CD learning path by Christian Hernandez

• Overview
• Getting Started
• Deploying an Application
• Working with Kustomize
• Working with Helm
• Syncwave and Hooks

Tekton learning path by Langdon White:

• Overview
• What is Continuous Integration
• What is Continuous Delivery
• What is Continuous Deployment
• What is Tekton
• Why Tekton is Good for Product Managers

Shout-out to Langdon and Christian for contributing to these new learning paths for KBE! 

If you want to read more on GitOps, download the e-book by Christian Hernandez on "The Path to GitOps" covering the following topics:

• Learn how GitOps relates to the DevOps movement and examine the foundational GitOps principles defined by the OpenGitOps Sandbox project
• Discover best practices for structuring Git workflows for your deployments
• Understand where GitOps fits in your CI/CD (continuous integration/continuous delivery) pipelines and explore the various ways you can implement it
• Explore Argo CD, Flux, and other popular tools used to manage GitOps workflows, and see how Kustomize, Helm, and Kubernetes Operators help minimize the management of lengthy configuration files
• Get tips for setting up policies and security for your Git workflows

Contribute to KBE

We have a lot of fun working with community contributors and are committed to keeping KBE content updated and relevant. If you would like to contribute or have suggestions, reach out to us, we’re always open to feedback! 

• Leave anonymous feedback
• DM us @kubebyexample
• Join the discussion on the KBE community forum

Another car ride in Detroit with KBE Insider Host and Clinical Assistant Professor of Computing and Data Sciences at Boston University Langdon White behind the wheel while at KubeCon last month with Christian Hernandez Sr Principal Product Manager at Red Hat.

We had the chance to catch up with Katie Gamanji, Sr. Kubernetes Field Engineer at Apple and member of CNCF’s Technical Oversight Committee (TOC), while at KubeCon in Detroit. Catch the full car interview with Katie and our KBE Insider host, behind the wheel, Langdon White, Clinical Assistant Professor of Computing and Data Sciences at Boston University, in our Mustang Mach-E our friends at Ford Motor Company lent us while at KubeCon!

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Let’s learn Kubernetes and Cloud Native skills

A huge takeaway from Katie’s car interview is getting involved in the Kubernetes and Cloud Native community. An initiative she’s taken to make getting involved in the community more attainable is leading the creation of the Kubernetes and Cloud Native Associate (KCNA) exam for CNCF. So what is this entry-level certification? From CNCF, “The KCNA is pre-professional certification designed for candidates interested in advancing to the professional level through a demonstrated understanding of Kubernetes fundamental knowledge and skills.” 

We dig the KCNA because it’s an entry-level CNCF certification and focuses on 5 disciplines within the Kubernetes and Cloud Native landscape:

• Kubernetes Fundamentals
• Container Orchestration
• Cloud Native Architecture
• Cloud Native Observability
• Cloud Native Application Delivery

The exam is multiple-choice, proctored, and conveniently offered online. No prerequisites are suggested by CNCF. However, we think you do need some hands-on and theoretical knowledge of Kubernetes and Cloud Native projects and its evolving landscape. 

Get involved in the Kubernetes community and learn more about the KCNA exam!

KBE can help you get started for free!

We think knowledge of Linux, Kubernetes, and Cloud Native fundamentals is a definite plus before taking the KCNA exam. Get started for free with Kube By Example (KBE) and our 17 free learning paths. Here are our recommended learning paths to get you prepped for the KCNA:

• Linux Fundamentals
• Container Fundamentals
• Kubernetes Fundamentals

CNCF also offers a Kubernetes and Cloud Native Essentials learning path you can bundle with your KCNA exam. Shout-out to CNCF for offering this beginner course and entry-level exam to get more people involved in the growing community. 

We’re committed to keeping KBE content updated and relevant. If you would like to contribute or have suggestions, reach out to us: you can give us anonymous feedback or DM us @kubebyexample, or join the discussion on the KBE community forum. 

We had the chance to catch up with Katie Gamanji, Sr Kubernetes Field Engineer at Apple and member of CNCF’s Technical Oversight Committee (TOC), while at KubeCon in Detroit. Watch the full car interview.

We’ve been busy at Kube By Example (KBE) prepping for KubeCon North America 2022 in Detroit! We’re super excited to partner with our customer, Ford Motor Company at KubeCon on sharing their cloud-native transformation story and how they used KBE to help get them started! 

You can read the Q&A on SD Times and hear what Beckie Riss, Principal Architect, Developer Relations, Tools & Enablement, Ford Motor Company has to say while riding in a Ford Mustang Mach-E in our KBE Insider car interview series at KubeCon in Detroit! 

If you were at KubeCon in Detroit you may have seen us zipping around the streets of downtown Detroit conducting car interviews for KBE Insider! Check-out our new Twitter handle @kubebyexample for some videos clips and snapshots! We’ll be releasing the videos in the next few weeks so follow us on Twitter and stay tuned for the latest and greatest, these car interviews were so much fun! Shout-out to @1angdon for being our  #1 host - you rocked it at KubeCon on minimal coffee (we owe you tons of coffee and stroopwafels in Amsterdam)! 

Thank you @FordDevTeam for lending us the super cool Mustang Mach-E! We’re still stoked y’all kept the KBE decals on the vehicle! 

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@ChrisShort tweet https://twitter.com/ChrisShort/status/1585260802784698368 

Ford Motor Company is hiring developers with cloud-native skills, check out their careers page for more details! Hear more about Ford’s culture and its commitment to invest in its people as well as how KBE was used to help Ford transform their software development teams to upskill their workforce. 

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What’s new with KBE? 

Here’s an update of what KBE launched at KubeCon North America (read the official press blog post):

New Learning Paths:

• Argo CD, shout-out to @christianh814
• Tekton, shout-out to @1angdon

Site Updates: 

• Updated homepage
• New community contributor’s page

Follow us @kubebyexample

Let us know what you think, you can give us anonymous feedback or join the KBE community forum and chat with the community real time! 

What next for KBE?

As we mentioned, stay tuned we have tons of KBE Insider car interviews we’ll be releasing in the next few weeks! 

We’re also planning the next updates to our curriculum and site updates to better serve the community so let us know if you want us to update or add from our list of 17 learning paths or DM us on @kubebyexample or the KBE community forum if you want to contribute!

See y’all in Amsterdam for KubeCon Europe where we plan to take our KBE Insider series on the road again (or canal this time?) and don’t forget the KubeCon Europe CFP has been extended, deadline is now November 18th submit! 

We partnered with Ford Motor Company at KubeCon North America 2022! Check-out our new Twitter handle to watch car interviews for KBE Insider in the Mach-E.

Hot off the press for KubeCon Europe 2022! Keeping up with our plans to continuously update our content and keeping it relevant for the Kubernetes community to consume and learn by doing as well as learn by watching, Kube by Example (KBE) adds 5 new learning paths — that’s 15 total learning paths showcasing a breadth of Kubernetes and cloud-native content. We’re also excited about our new KBE community forum which will allow us to engage with the community real time. Read the official press blog here.

What’s new with KBE learning paths?

Check out the following new learning paths (bookmark them now!):

• Istio
• Knative
• Kubernetes Security
• Load Balancing with MetalLB
• Storage for Kubernetes with Rook

The new learning path additions add to our existing Kubernetes “Cloud Native Fundamentals” and “Application Development” learning tracks which are more geared towards operators and developers. With “Kubernetes Security”, we introduce a dedicated track that we think is just as important, especially with security top of mind at all organizations today. We hope the community finds the new hands-on content useful by allowing you to practice new skills as they are explored and explained. As always, we welcome feedback or just let us know what new learning paths you would like on KBE! 

What else is new? KBE community forum (beta)

Preview our new KBE community forum sponsored by Red Hat Learning. It’s the beta edition, so it’s a sneak peek of what's to come later this year. If you're stuck on a lesson, use the KBE community forum to get your questions answered real time or use it to start a discussion with hundreds of learning community members. Dive into the KBE community forum and follow discussions, connect with the community, and discuss topics that range from lessons on KBE to tips on how to get started in the open source community. Join the KBE Community Forum now!

KBE adds 5 new learning paths — that’s 15 total learning paths showcasing a breadth of Kubernetes and cloud-native content. We’re also excited about our new KBE community forum which will allow us to engage with the community real time!

Do you create technical content? Do you struggle to keep it updated and relevant?

Technology changes so fast that the moment you write something about it, the writing and the technology itself quickly become out of date, or even worse, irrelevant. Anyone who creates and maintains technical content, such as blog posts, articles, learning paths/lessons, demos, or workshops, understands this.

Keeping content updated can be a manual and time-consuming task that must be repeated over and over again depending on how fast the technology changes.

We at Kube by Example aren't exempt from dealing with this problem. We have, however, come up with some practices we use when creating content that needs to be maintained going forward.

This blog post's original intent was to outline some of these practices we use. However, after writing and reviewing the post we felt it was even more important than a simple blog post. Therefore, we decided to create the Keeping Content Relevant with Automation resource.

In the resource, we discuss the fundamental problem of keeping content relevant and then introduce some automation strategies, tools, and techniques we use here at Kube by Example for helping to keep our content updated and relevant, with as little human intervention as possible.

The strategy we outline isn’t only relevant for technical content: it can be used to apply continuous integration best practices to everyday software development.

Please give it a read! Hopefully it will help you as much as it helps us!

Do you create technical content? Do you struggle to keep it updated and relevant? We’ll discuss the fundamental problem of keeping content relevant and then introduce some automation strategies, tools, and techniques we use here at Kube by Example for helping to keep our content updated and relevant, with as little human intervention as possible.
 

Hot off the press! Our new AI/ML (Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning) learning path just published and we’re super excited. The first chapter (with many more to come) introduces Jupyter and the steps to deploy the open source interactive application for creating and running data science project Notebooks in an Integrated Development Environment (IDE). Jupyter Notebook combines text, equations, multimedia, interactive code, and formulas with collaborators or teams with JupyterHub, hosting Notebooks and other resources as a service. JupyterHub runs on Kubernetes to automate scaling and resource management for collaboration. 

Use Helm to deploy JupyterHub

In this chapter of the new AI/ML learning path, you’ll walk through installing Helm on your Kubernetes cluster. Helm is an open source package manager used to install, manage, and upgrade Kubernetes clusters. Using Helm charts, you can deploy and configure JupyterHub on a Kubernetes cluster. Helm charts are stored in YAML files and describe a set of resources, usually an application or application stack, to deploy on a Kubernetes cluster. Once you deploy Helm, you can work with JupyterHub Charts published in repositories or create your very own. The beauty of Helm is it automates installing JupyerHub Chart by fetching it from the repositories. 

Check-out this chapter of the new AI/ML learning path and stay tuned for additional chapters coming soon as well as bookmark all our KBE Learning Paths for future “learn by doing” or “learn by watching”. Happy Helming!

Our new AI/ML (Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning) learning path just published. The first chapter introduces Jupyter and the steps to deploy the open source interactive application for creating and running data science project Notebooks in an IDE.

We had the chance to hang-out with Liz Rice twice last week! Liz is the Chief Open Source Officer with cloud-native networking and security specialists Isovalent, creators of the Cilium eBPF-based networking project. Why twice? Why not? Find out why here.

What got Liz Rice interested in open source? 

In every KBE-Insider episode we ask our guests how they got into open source and share what motivated them to contribute. Liz admits she was late to the party when it came to open source. A lot of it had to do with the early days of open source and how the tech industry was very suspicious of how people could contribute to good development practices from an open community with no organization. What got Liz into containers she recalls was when she was at a start-up where the CTO was getting very excited about Docker and she thought it would be worth it to check-out and that’s where she discovered this entire new world. Liz learned with containers there was this community of nice people who got together contributing to open source projects, and she was having a lot of fun. An added bonus was containers got her back into “hard tech”, which she describes as sparking her interest of “how things work in tech and how do we make it better”.

The importance of the TOC for the CNCF

Today, Liz is Chair of the Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) for the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) where she oversees the governing technical board. The TOC’s role is to ensure there are checks and balances within CNCF and that the technological governance should be separated by the sponsored members (or vendors) so that the CNCF projects are vendor-neutral. Keeping the balance so that sponsored members or vendors don’t dominate the direction of the CNCF projects. This provides a healthy sustainable ecosystem and ensures that the projects that are brought under the CNCF umbrella are cloud-native. The list of CNCF members is massive, representing the largest cloud providers to start-ups, basically all vendors of all sizes who are interested in cloud-native. The TOC brings experienced engineers who have an understanding of real world use cases, making crucial decisions that take precedence over the future of CNCF.

What’s next for the TOC? There are open questions such as “How big should CNCF be? How many projects should be under CNCF? Do we lose cohesity as we scale? What’s the correct balance? Etc.” What do you think? Start a discussion below. 

What’s Liz looking forward to in 2022? 

Liz is hoping we can all see each other in person and catch-up with the community at KubeCon Europe in Valencia, Spain later this year and so are we (look out for updates as KBE plans to be in Valencia too!). 

Register now for KubeCon Europe and don’t forget to subscribe to KBE-Insider and keep up to date on future guests!

In every KBE-Insider episode we ask our guest how they got into open source to share what motivated them to contribute. Liz admits she was late to the party when it came to open source.