How to Upskill Your Team with Kubernetes

I’m the Engineering Manager for the Cloud Innovation team at Temenos where I manage seven senior DevOps engineers. As our company is getting into more cloud providers, we decided to get into Kubernetes so that we can run our solutions across all clouds and save money.

We decided that rather than going to market we would train everyone internally to upskill employees, give them job satisfaction and retain them. This initiative turned out to be more successful than I thought. Therefore, I would like to share my journey with other managers and tech leads wanting to start a similar process.

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The overall plan was to get everyone through the Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA). We first set out to do the Introduction to Kubernetes first, as this was the prerequisite for the Kubernetes certification, and a great starter to get into study mode. After my team was skilled up we would then go and teach other teams what we had learnt.

After we finished the Introduction to Kubernetes course, we found that Kubernetes wasn’t as scary as we thought, and we started using it straight away for our Internal DevOps toolset. We had our Jenkins server sitting inside AWS ECS, running Docker so we decided to put that setup into Kubernetes as a nice fun project to start off with.

Already we found that we were reducing “new tech debt” as we were developing solutions that we wouldn’t have to go back and change in two month’s time and employees could increase code throughput and get more projects to market faster, with increased employee satisfaction.

Here are some tips to make your Kubernetes upskilling journey successful:

1. Have weekly one-on-ones with your team.
2. Complete the journey as a team.
3. Lead by example.
4. Get executive buy in.
5. Get your (Read more...)