“The Helmsman” in the Business World
Why Kubernetes succeeded and why certifications matter
Slide contents
1. “The Helmsman” in the Business World
Why Kubernetes succeeded and why certifications matter
2. What we'll cover
Context: acquisition in a fintech
Why Kubernetes won
CNCF certifications and membership
Our k8s roadmap
3. 01. Context
What acquisition looks like inside a large fintech
4. Dozens of services and containers
About 100 engineers in acquisition
Public sites, unauthenticated zone
Content management — ~40 services
Acquisition channel automation
Journal, special projects, RnD
5. GKE or self-hosted
Tried Rancher, moved away
Dev/test on GKE
Prod on GKE when possible
Else Docker on VMware
6. 02. Why Kubernetes Won
Through the lens of Maslow's hierarchy of needs
7. Higher means closer to value
8. Business and IT read it from opposite ends
9. Kubernetes resolves the layer conflict
10. k8s is not a free abstraction
Its own complexity to automate
Won't fix bad architecture
Small products: managed is enough
Decide by product constraints
11. Kubernetes — the de-facto standard
Per shodan.io, 2019
Roughly quarterly releases
CNCF: vast cloud-native ecosystem
20,534 clusters vs 868 Swarm
Mature certification programs
12. 03. CNCF Certifications
CKA, CKAD and KCSP
13. CKA — a hands-on admin exam
Online, proctored, performance-based
3 hours, ~24 tasks, $300
1 tab with kubernetes.io docs
Core, security, networking, troubleshooting
Practical, but lags versions
14. CKAD — for application developers
People who design and run applications
Pod Design — 20% · build and run pods
Configuration — 18% · configs and secrets
Observability — 18% · logs, probes, debugging
15. KCSP — certification for companies
For organizations, not individuals
≥ 3 CKA engineers (CKAD doesn't count)
Business model: customer support
CNCF membership required
Access to requests, CNCF marketing
16. Membership is cheaper than you think
What it costs to join
$7–10K — Silver — companies under 100 people
$1,000 — Academic — universities and schools
$500 — Nonprofit — charities and foundations
17. A certificate is a route, not proof
Engineer — a map of the platform
Company — a hiring signal
Skips architecture and incidents
Real check — delivery speed
18. 04. Our Roadmap
Where we're heading with k8s in the acquisition org
19. Projects to k8s, people to CNCF
All digital projects — to k8s
Prod without personal data — to GKE
Training and certification
Hiring and local CNCF community
20. Takeaways
Business pays for the path to Apps
k8s standardizes the lower layers
Managed often beats your own cluster
A certificate is a learning route
choose by constraints, not by fashion
21. References and Materials
Kubernetes docs: kubernetes.io/docs
CNCF and landscape: cncf.io · landscape.cncf.io
CNCF certifications: cncf.io/certification
Borg/Omega/Kubernetes + Patterns
22. Thank you!
polomodov.tech
All slides and links — in the Telegram channel
Alexander Polomodov, Development Manager, Tinkoff.ru
@book_cube