"Helmsman" in the world of business

Alexander introduces himself: he heads development in the customer acquisition unit at Tinkoff, more than a hundred technical specialists building the company's digital projects — the content management system, acquisition-channel automation, Tinkoff Journal and special projects. The team has plenty of containerised workloads. The bank used to run another platform they happily no longer use; today the dev and test environments of many projects run in GKE, and a colleague, Stas, who asked that epic balancing question during the previous talk, has already explained at a meetup how the team keeps the bill comparatively modest. Some projects run there in production too, usually those without personal data. Where managed Kubernetes cannot be used, applications are hosted as Docker containers on virtual machines.

Why Kubernetes rather than containers on virtual machines? While preparing the talk, Alexander recalled Maslow's hierarchy of needs: devised over fifty years ago with five levels (physiology, safety, belonging, esteem and self-actualisation), where a person whose lower ones are covered thinks about the upper ones. Internal IT is busy with those lower levels: data centres, hardware, hypervisor licences, DNS, while containers as a service get what is left. For the business the pyramid is inverted: while the network stays up and the disks hold, the physical layer is of no interest, and attention starts at infrastructure and platform as a service. The business wants its processes automated, not middleware written in-house, hence the competition between internal IT and providers such as Yandex Cloud, which promised an alpha of containers as a service in April. Kubernetes is the key to that conflict: it declaratively describes how an application should be deployed and run, shielding the layers below. After Google published it and a foundation formed around it, it became the de facto standard: alternatives are barely discussed, releases come roughly once a quarter.

The CNCF offers two tracks: certifying specialists and organisations. An individual can take the cluster administrator exam or the application developer one; Alexander sat the former a couple of months or so ago. It runs online from any room where you are alone, bright enough, with a desk and little else. It is not a quiz but lab work: 24 tasks in three hours, seven and a half minutes per task on average, 300 dollars, or 200 in a sale, with two attempts included. Tasks are weighted differently and ordered from simple to hard, so an even pace lets you down: by the last three there is no time left. Alexander failed his first attempt: he could not work out what to do with an unwell cluster, and misjudged the timing. The certificate is valid for two years, after which the labs must be retaken.

He prepared with the official documentation and the LFS258 course, sold in a bundle with the right to sit the exam. Documentation comes first in his advice: it is open during the exam, so it pays to map problems you solve onto sections of the site beforehand. The course is theory plus labs with scripts that deploy everything in GCP, but a lot happens under the bonnet: understanding arrived once he started doing things his own way, changing the network configuration or taking a different container runtime, and digging into why it all fell apart. The syllabus at the time covered version 1.12, the course was about 1.8 or 1.9, and he sat the exam on 1.10 or 1.11, noticing almost no difference: no questions about the newer features. One or two tasks, by his reckoning, cannot be solved in seven and a half minutes; he skipped them, which did not affect passing. The application developer exam he never sat: by his guess it runs two hours, has several times fewer tasks and, judging by the syllabus, drops exactly the topics he stumbled on.

Organisation certification is aimed at service providers. The requirements: three certified administrators on staff (application developers do not count), a business model aimed at end-user services, and CNCF membership, which drags Linux Foundation membership with it. The upsides are a partner listing on the site, monthly meetings with the leaders of the foundation's projects and its governing board, and leads, that is requests from end users; Alexander is unsure of their value on the Russian market, though they may matter on the Western one. He had discussed the prices with Danila beforehand: membership costs a serious sum every year, and a day or two earlier a Russian company, Flant, took a silver membership, most likely at the lower limit — itself far from cheap. There is a lighter option for companies that build for themselves: Zalando, a frequent conference speaker, exists in that form. Alexander is not taking his own unit down that road: they will not pay that kind of money, and an in-house department's business model is different.

The team's plans are large nonetheless: bring the digital projects to runtime in Kubernetes, put those that can go there into production in GKE, and launch those holding personal data in Russia as soon as a provider with fully managed Kubernetes appears. By the end of the year they will most likely have three certified administrators on staff, the formal requirement for a service provider. In hiring, a certificate solves nothing on the candidate's behalf: it is a reason to invite them and open with high-level questions rather than small details, to see how their thinking works. Inside teams people have no time to close their own weak spots, so the exam works as an external deadline: Alexander bought the course with the exam and fitted into the year, failing the first attempt a fortnight before it ran out and passing on the last day. To the business this is explained as an investment of time and effort: Kubernetes together with GitLab has already sped up development automation, CI pipelines and spinning up dynamic environments. The objection comes from the floor, that a trained engineer will be poached with his certificate, and with it the answer: what if we do not train him and he stays? Alexander has not met that in his own unit.