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Kubernetes-Hungry Businesses Recruit To Fill Their Skill Gaps At KubeCon

Oracle

At KubeCon San Diego, the 12,000-strong convention celebrating the open source ecosystem blossoming around the Kubernetes cloud orchestration platform, something was different this year. With Kubernetes’ success has come mainstream interest, a slightly more conventional looking software developer audience, and hundreds of big, established companies looking to recruit for this rare skill set.

“There are thousands of people here from companies moving to cloud native,” says Liz Rice, vice president of open source engineering at Aqua Security, which provides security for cloud native deployments. “This is changing the dynamic to mature software that people are using in production.”

Why is Kubernetes so important? Docker containers made it easy to deploy applications packaged with all their runtime dependencies. But eventually, deploying these containerized applications at a scale of thousands surpasses human ability. Enter the open source container orchestration system Kubernetes, whose main unit is the pod, or group of containers. On the foundation of this “operating system of the cloud,” scores of other open source projects have been launched, including Helm, Prometheus, and Linkerd.

Proof that the cloud native workload is expanding dramatically was easy to find at KubeCon: Speakers revealed deployments that included Air Force F15 jets and driverless cars. However, “the skills gap will continue to widen. You can’t fill it with people, because there’s not enough people,” says Bob Quillin, Oracle’s vice president of developer relations for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, whose Docker container-management startup StackEngine was acquired by Oracle in 2015.

“There are a lot of enterprises now at KubeCon that are new to cloud native, and thus a lot of demand for 101-level content in addition to advanced 201 and 301 sessions,” Quillin says. “While there are training opportunities all over the ecosystem, companies should be looking to leapfrog the basics in infrastructure with managed cloud services that allow you to accelerate up the learning curve.”

The good news is that there is a diversity-and-inclusion message thrumming within the vast community managed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), and that has, itself, become conventional. Even if the developer demographics at the event look similar to those of other tech communities, there seems to be an understanding that Kubernetes is different than some open source movements of the recent past that didn’t welcome diversity. Indeed, keynote speakers Kelsey Hightower of Google and Kostadis Roussos of VMware were among many who gave moving testimonials about the power of diversity in their careers.

“When I first came to KubeCon in 2017 in Austin I was worried this would be a toxic space, what with GamerGate and other open source issues. I was very nervous. It was a revelation,” Roussos said. With more open jobs than available talent, it’s an employee’s market where skill trumps demographics—and even location.

Remote Workers? Please Apply

“We didn’t bring a recruiter, we’re direct hiring—our CTO is here too. If we hire even one engineer out of this, that’s a win for us, because we’re trying to change the financial industry and we need great engineers to do so,” says Timothy Miller, an engineering director who’s looking for 30 developers for one of the world’s largest banks, MUFG. In a similar vein, a recruiter from the New York Times touted its open.nytimes.com blog, which tells the behind-the-scenes story of how the Times uses and builds new technology, and noted the company is hiring to add to its hundreds of developers who work on its custom-built content management system and other needs.

Also hiring? San Francisco-based self-driving startup Cruise is seeking hundreds of engineers skilled in everything from robotics to cloud-native applications. Discover has more than 300 open technology jobs, including Java developers. The Red Cross is seeking volunteers via its #Code4Good initiative. Home Depot had a booth at the conference staffed with engineers who themselves are learning Kubernetes. Reddit is in search of engineering and community-building hires alike among 500 open positions. And, according to the marker-scrawled jobs board, many, many more companies are hiring.

Perks range from fully remote work (“I just need the best engineers. I don’t care where they live,” says one hiring manager) to life coaching.

What About the Technology?

Most KubeCon presentations highlight how an engineering team has made Kubernetes or a related cloud technology work for their use case. Ancestry.com, for example, described saving hundred of thousands of dollars worth of compute cycles for its massive Java-based workloads via a machine learning system that continuously improved production deployments and avoided downtime.

Meet-the-maintainer sessions are opportunities for developers to meet the people who run various CNCF open source projects. Standing at a table in one such session, an advocate for Vitess described the open source project, which was built on MySQL and used to scale databases for YouTube, Slack, Pinterest, Flipkart, and more.

Elastic engineer Sebastien Guilloux explained how to build Kubernetes operators—and was amazed to see 2,500 people attend. He drew a far bigger crowd than at any event he’s done in his home in Toulouse, France. Still, the personal contacts made the biggest impression. “I did talk with a lot of folks that are using our operator and have pretty technical questions. I’ve never met people using it face to face,” Guilloux says. “It’s really great to get feedback.”

Another growing area is monitoring and debugging throughout the DevOps pipeline, which is a natural fit for the cloud-native orchestration ecosystem. Companies like Datadog allow developers to instrument their containerized code and deployment infrastructure at the same time. Similarly, Rookout instruments Python, Javascript, and Java-based code so that developers can debug and check deployment logs at the same time.

Security controls are needed to mitigate the growing risks of Kubernetes-specific attacks, as Rice pointed out in her talk about how hackers might spoof the origin of Kubernetes pods to launch an attack. She notes, however, that such an attack hasn’t been seen in the wild yet, and it isn’t an easy exploit. “A hacker has to land some compromised code into your deployment, but once they’ve done that, it is pretty frightening.”

The Joy of Community

Wearing her blue CNCF cape with pride, Seattle-based cloud advocate Kaslin Fields was thrilled to be the first Oracle staffer named a CNCF ambassador. She spent her days live tweeting, posting drawings of her KubeCon experience on her website, and welcoming attendees to the Kubernetes ecosystem: “There’s always a lot of talk about how to get started contributing to open source,” she says.

Lisa-Marie Namphy, a developer advocate and community architect at Portworx who also runs the world’s largest CNCF meetup, Cloud Native Containers, agrees that there are plenty of ways to participate. “I love this community. It’s diverse, really smart, and really fun,” she says. “Everybody thinks about ways to contribute code, but we still need doc writers, and there are so many other ways to contribute. Shows like this are great because so many parts of the community come together.”