3 ms·

The post you're replying to is absolute hyperbole. If you're hiring k8s guys who don't know etcd and the backend of k8s (we're not going to understand every sin

by swozey 9y ago

The post you're replying to is absolute hyperbole. If you're hiring k8s guys who don't know etcd and the backend of k8s (we're not going to understand every single gear, I constantly forget how k8s garbage collects, I never have to interact with it) then you're not hiring Seniors who have worked on k8s for several years. That's no different from hiring a linux admin who only knows how to fix Cpanel. You made a bad hire or your budget wasn't high enough to attract experienced talent. I'm one of the most frequent commenters on #kubernetes-users so I'm very aware of the questions and issues that come in from new k8s users and I'd say an absolutely massive majority of the users are running in baremetal via kubeadm/kops/etc. Typically on AWS (NOT EKS). The #gke channel is literally 1/10th the size of the #kubernetes-users channel. If you have questions about k8s post in #kubernetes-users. The community is extremely helpful. A LOT of people deploy K8s clusters via Terraform/Ansible, as well. Why are professionals who know k8s back and forth less common? 2 years ago k8s was 1.1 and we had no idea where the market was going and if it would take off like it did. It takes time to build up the community and expertise. There are a LOT of very experienced k8s users nowadays whereas there were not 2 years ago. Finding someone with 2+ years of k8s experience who isn't a Xoogler is fairly rare right now because 2 years ago it wasn't the market behemoth that it is right now. I don't work with Google but I just happened to get involved with k8s almost 3 years ago. We are out there. If you can't find an answer ping me @mikej and I'll try to get you going in the right direction.

falcolas 9y ago
You call it hyperbole, yet you just also verified that the scarcity is a real problem. > If you're hiring k8s guys who don't know etcd and the backend of k8s [...] then you're not hiring Seniors who have worked on k8s for several years. > Finding someone with 2+ years of k8s experience who isn't a Xoogler is fairly rare right now because 2 years ago it wasn't the market behemoth that it is right now. Indeed, there's not enough people who know how to run it for as broadly as it's spread; for how much it's hyped. If there's a thousand people out there who have that level of experience, I'd be surprised. And in an industry running hundreds of thousands of clusters (or more!), that's just too few people.
- swozey 9y ago
  There are almost 24k people in the k8s.slack.io #kubernetes-users channel and it's only a small portion of the actual community. For instance I rarely see people from other huge K8s consumers, like Lyft, Zalando, Walmart, etc in the channel (high probability they just don't mention where they are or I never noticed). I won't deny actual k8s experts are low in abundance right now. It's a complex platform in its near infancy. There are people brand new to k8s embarking on the journey to learn it every day in slack. Give them 6mo+ or another year and you'll have a few near experts and a ton of just generally experienced admins. I don't feel as though it's any different from when I was working on my CCIE. When I was working on that there were only 18k other people out there who had CCIEs. I very rarely met one or even someone with just that level of skill (I'm not in the Bay Area/NYC). I had to ask questions through newsgroups and IRC and in IRC there were maybe 4-10 people at that level out of thousands. You could say there are thousands of networks out there that need a CCIE to run them but that isn't ever what happened; you'd have a CCIE basically lead from the top and their skill/experience would trickle down to lesser experienced netengs or they'd be brought in as consultants when necessary. I've worked with very few CCIEs. I see k8s going the same way. Every State will likely have a handful of experts on the subject while there will remain a ton of CCNA/CCNP level k8s admins and you just need to determine how complex your k8s infrastructure is and what level you'll need to hire to effectively manage it. Brendan Burns goal is to democratize ephemeral infrastructure so that anyone who can code can manage it. That's another topic entirely but the community is starting to output enough general guidance in the form of blogs, books, slack, et al. that hopping into the ecosystem now is basically a breeze compared to what it was when I got involved in the 1.x days. Could just be that I'm a masochist and like learning painful things. My biggest complaint about k8s right now is the lack of real-world production knowledge being distributed. A lot of people set up a cluster and leave it and never optimize it or make it actually production-ready. My goal is to significantly accelerate that through training, blogs, etc.
  - user5994461 9y ago
    18k CCIE is magnitudes more than the current amount of kubernetes experts. It's also not comparable. A network is setup only once by a CCIE. It's done and it doesn't need touching for the next 10 years. A kubernetes cluster is setup once and then the troubles begin. Constant care needed every week for 10 years.

by swozey 9y ago

falcolas 9y ago

You call it hyperbole, yet you just also verified that the scarcity is a real problem. > If you're hiring k8s guys who don't know etcd and the backend of k8s [...] then you're not hiring Seniors who have worked on k8s for several years. > Finding someone with 2+ years of k8s experience who isn't a Xoogler is fairly rare right now because 2 years ago it wasn't the market behemoth that it is right now. Indeed, there's not enough people who know how to run it for as broadly as it's spread; for how much it's hyped. If there's a thousand people out there who have that level of experience, I'd be surprised. And in an industry running hundreds of thousands of clusters (or more!), that's just too few people.

swozey 9y ago
There are almost 24k people in the k8s.slack.io #kubernetes-users channel and it's only a small portion of the actual community. For instance I rarely see people from other huge K8s consumers, like Lyft, Zalando, Walmart, etc in the channel (high probability they just don't mention where they are or I never noticed). I won't deny actual k8s experts are low in abundance right now. It's a complex platform in its near infancy. There are people brand new to k8s embarking on the journey to learn it every day in slack. Give them 6mo+ or another year and you'll have a few near experts and a ton of just generally experienced admins. I don't feel as though it's any different from when I was working on my CCIE. When I was working on that there were only 18k other people out there who had CCIEs. I very rarely met one or even someone with just that level of skill (I'm not in the Bay Area/NYC). I had to ask questions through newsgroups and IRC and in IRC there were maybe 4-10 people at that level out of thousands. You could say there are thousands of networks out there that need a CCIE to run them but that isn't ever what happened; you'd have a CCIE basically lead from the top and their skill/experience would trickle down to lesser experienced netengs or they'd be brought in as consultants when necessary. I've worked with very few CCIEs. I see k8s going the same way. Every State will likely have a handful of experts on the subject while there will remain a ton of CCNA/CCNP level k8s admins and you just need to determine how complex your k8s infrastructure is and what level you'll need to hire to effectively manage it. Brendan Burns goal is to democratize ephemeral infrastructure so that anyone who can code can manage it. That's another topic entirely but the community is starting to output enough general guidance in the form of blogs, books, slack, et al. that hopping into the ecosystem now is basically a breeze compared to what it was when I got involved in the 1.x days. Could just be that I'm a masochist and like learning painful things. My biggest complaint about k8s right now is the lack of real-world production knowledge being distributed. A lot of people set up a cluster and leave it and never optimize it or make it actually production-ready. My goal is to significantly accelerate that through training, blogs, etc.
- user5994461 9y ago
  18k CCIE is magnitudes more than the current amount of kubernetes experts. It's also not comparable. A network is setup only once by a CCIE. It's done and it doesn't need touching for the next 10 years. A kubernetes cluster is setup once and then the troubles begin. Constant care needed every week for 10 years.