Faseela K. is a platform development engineer with a background in open source networking. As she saw the use of containers growing more than the VMs she was working with, she began studying Kubernetes and eventually decided to pursue a Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA). We spoke to her about her experience.

Linux Foundation: What was the experience like taking the CKA exam?

Faseela K: I was actually nervous, as this was the first online certification exam I was taking from home, so there was some uncertainty going in. Would the proctor turn up on time? Will the cloud platform where we are taking the exam get stuck? Will I be able to finish the exam on time? Those and several other such questions ran through my mind. But I turned down all my concerns, had a very smooth exam experience, and was able to finish it without any difficulties. 

LF: How did you prepare for the exam?

FK: I am a person who uses Kubernetes in my day to day work, so the topics in the syllabus were familiar to me. On top of that I did some practice tests and online courses. Preparing for the exam made so many of my day to day work related tasks much easier, and my level of expertise on K8s increased considerably.

LF: How did preparing for and taking CKA help you improve your skills?

FK: Though I work on K8s regularly, the range of concepts and capabilities I was using were minimal. Preparing for CKA helped me touch upon all areas of K8s, and the experience which I already had helped me get a complete end to end view of things. I can troubleshoot Kubernetes issues in a better way now, and go deep into each problem to find a solution.

LF: Tell us more about your current job role. What types of activities are you engaged in and how has the CKA helped with them?

FK: I currently work as a platform development engineer at Cisco, where we develop and maintain an enterprise Kubernetes platform. Troubleshooting, upgrading, networking, and system management of containerized platforms are part of our daily tasks, and CKA has helped me master all these areas with perfection. The training which I took to prepare for the CKA phenomenally transformed my perspective about Kubernetes administration, and this has helped me attain an end to end view of the product. Debugging any issues in the platform has become easier than ever, and the certification has given me even more confidence with fixing issues in a time sensitive manner.

LF: You mentioned to us previously you’d like to take the Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD) next; what appeals to you about that certification?

FK: I am planning to go deeper into containerized application development in my career, and hence CKAD was appealing to me. In fact, I already completed CKAD and became CKAD certified within less than a month of achieving my CKA certification. The confidence I gained after CKA helped me try the second one also faster.

LF: Tell us about your experience working on the OpenDaylight project. What prompted you to move from focusing on SDN to Kubernetes?

FK: I was previously a member of the Technical Steering Committee of the OpenDaylight project at The Linux Foundation, and made a lot of contributions to OpenDaylight. Working in open source has been the most amazing experience I have ever had in my life, and OpenDaylight gave me exposure to the various activities under LF Networking, while being a part of The Linux Foundation generally helped me engage with some of the top notch brains across organizations. 

Coming together from across the globe during various conferences and DDFs, and working together across the company boundaries to solve common SDN problems has given me so much satisfaction. Over a period of time, containers were gaining traction over VMs, and I wanted to get more involved with containerization and platform development, where Kubernetes looked more promising.

LF: What are your future career goals?

FK: I intend to learn more about K8s internal implementation, and also to get involved with projects like istio, servicemesh and networkservicemesh in the future. My dream is to become a cloud native software developer, who promotes containerized application development in a cloud native way.

LF: What technology are you most interested in studying next?

FK: I am currently pursuing a course on the golang programming language. I also plan to take the Certified Kubernetes Security Specialist (CKS) exam if time permits.

The post Success Story: Preparing for Kubernetes Certification Improves a Platform Development Engineer’s Skills appeared first on Linux Foundation – Training.

Modern day supply chains leave greater potential for vulnerabilities, and supply chain security should be a high priority for organizations. Vulnerabilities could be catastrophic, and lead to unnecessary costs, inefficient delivery schedules and a loss of intellectual property. 

In addition, over the last few years, supply chains have increasingly been exposed as a major weak point in organizational security. While security may be top of mind within company walls, you are only as strong as your most vulnerable supplier.

We are excited to bring the community a new event where folks can learn directly from experts who have been working on how to solve these vulnerabilities for almost a decade, to find out how to best protect their supply chain and mitigate potential disaster.

Anyone involved in ensuring their company’s supply chain is secure including security professionals, executive leadership and tech leaders.

The event is free to attend, and will take place virtually on August 18. It is comprised of nine sessions covering all aspects of protecting the supply chain, including talks on:

Generating SBOMs for IoT at Build TimeSecuring GCC & GLIBCBuilding Signing, Distributing SPDX SBOMs as Artifact Reference TypeSoftware Supply Chain Integrity with Sigstore

View all sessions, speakers and register to attend here.

The post Announcing new event focused on Building Cybersecurity into the Software Supply Chain, August 18, Virtual appeared first on Linux Foundation.

Prometeo Platform S.L. is open sourcing ‘Pyrrha’ to monitor and act on firefighters’ health and safety as they battle blazes, with support from Samsung

SAN FRANCISCO — The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced it will host Pyrrha, created and contributed by Prometeo Platform S.L., in collaboration with IBM to help accelerate the development and deployment of firefighter safety technology around the world. In 2019, Prometeo was named the winner of the Call for Code Global Challenge and since then their technology has been further developed with updated hardware and enhanced software through work with the IBM volunteer Service Corps and leading ecosystem partners.

Climate change has created more dangerous conditions for firefighters by increasing the risk and extent of wildfires around the world. From Australia’s 2020 brushfires, to record-breaking wildfires in Spain and the Western United States, fires in recent years have increased in number, severity, and destruction, while posing greater immediate and long-term health risks to firefighters who battle these blazes. According to Cal Fire, California is already experiencing a 26% increase in 2021 wildfire activity and a 58% increase in acres burned compared to 2020.

Through the Pyrrha open source project, Prometeo, the Linux Foundation, and IBM aim to accelerate innovation around firefighter health monitoring and safety. By partnering with leading companies from the Call for Code ecosystem like Samsung, the goal is to customize and scale the solution around the world in an effort to help save lives.

“Samsung and IBM have collaborated for many years to create industry leading technologies that solve challenging societal and business problems. Now we’re excited to work together to advance tech for good and help combat the effects of climate change,” said Executive Vice President of Samsung B2B Mobile KC Choi. “As a huge proponent of open source technology, we see Call for Code as a unique opportunity to deploy real world solutions based on open source technologies. We’re excited to be able to equip award-winning teams like Prometeo with resources to strengthen their solution as it is actively tested, deployed, and now made available in open source. We also look forward to increasing our own participation in Call for Code.”

The Prometeo solution was created by a nurse, a firefighter, and developers as a system that uses artificial intelligence and the internet of things to guard the safety of firefighters. Over the past two years through collaboration with Call for Code ecosystem partners, Prometeo has improved its technology across offline usage, through integration with mobile phones and watches to provided two-way alerts, and in capturing the averages of toxin exposure over time. Through field tests in Spain in early 2020 and 2021, the technology has incorporated firefighter feedback and amassed anonymized technical data to improve the solution end-to-end.

“Pyrrha is another example of the power of open source to accelerate technology innovation that can save lives,” said Mike Dolan, senior vice president and GM of Projects at the Linux Foundation. “We are happy to support and host the development of Pyrrha and the community that is building and using it.”

“On behalf of the Prometeo team, we want to extend our deepest thanks to our many partners who have contributed to improve this solution and help protect firefighters,” said Salome Valero, co-founder of Prometeo. “We set out to create technology that would equip firefighters with personalized monitoring of their exposure to toxic substances. Through the contributions of our partners and the open source community, that dream is becoming a reality through the Pyrrha open source project.”

In addition to the Linux Foundation, IBM and Samsung, Prometeo’s ecosystem partners in the Pyrrha community include a variety of leading tech companies and institutions:

Arrow Electronics has helped improve Prometeo’s IoT devices.GRAF/Bombers de la Generalitat de Catalunya facilitated multiple rounds of field testing of  testing with Prometeo’s technology during controlled burns in Spain. The Pau Costa Foundation is helping connect Prometeo with a global community of firefighters, and exploring opportunities for further field testing.Peli has contributed their expertise in creating firefighter gear to help enhance Prometeo’s hardware.Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona has contributed lab access and technical expertise to help calibrate devices.

IBM and The Linux Foundation have a rich history of deploying projects that help drive progress in society through innovation. The winner of the 2018 Call for Code Global Challenge, Project OWL, contributed its IoT device firmware in March 2020 as the ClusterDuck Protocol. Since then, more than a dozen Call for Code deployment projects have been open sourced for communities that need them most, with solutions ranging from disaster-response, to mitigating climate change, and promoting racial justice.

The Pyrrha project community encourages new users to contribute and to deploy the software in new environments around the world. Priorities for short term updates include adapting the hardware for usage in new locations, improving the analysis of toxin exposure  over time, and further improving the mobile and smartphone capabilities. For more information, please visit: ​https://pyrrha-platform.org.

The 2021 Call for Code Global Challenge invites the world’s software developers and innovators to combat climate change with open source-powered technology. Call for Code’s diverse and like-minded global ecosystem of experts, companies, foundations, universities, and celebrities continues to expand. It includes UN World Food Programme Innovation Accelerator experts, Arrow Electronics, Black Girls Code, Caribbean Girls Hack, charity: water, Clinton Foundation, Clinton Global Initiative University, Heifer International, Ingram Micro, Intuit, Kode With Klossy, NearForm, United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, United Way, and World Institute on Disability.

For more information and to begin contributing, please visit: https://developer.ibm.com/callforcode/solutions/projects/get-started/ & https://github.com/Pyrrha-Platform

About Call for Code 
Developers have revolutionized the way people live and interact with virtually everyone and everything. Where most people see challenges, developers see possibilities. That’s why David Clark, the CEO of David Clark Cause, created Call for Code in 2018, and launched it alongside Founding Partner IBM and Charitable Partner UN Human Rights. Since then, Call for Code has scaled to include an annual University Challenge in addition to regional prizes and the creation of Call for Code for Racial Justice. This multi-year global initiative is a rallying cry to developers to use their mastery of the latest technologies to drive positive and long-lasting change across the world through code. Call for Code Global Challenge winning solutions are further developed, incubated, and deployed as sustainable open source projects to ensure they can drive positive change. To learn more about past winners and their progress, visit IBM Developer.

About The Linux Foundation

Founded in 2000, The Linux Foundation is supported by more than 1,000 members and is the world’s leading home for collaboration on open source software, open standards, open data, and open hardware. The Linux Foundation’s projects are critical to the world’s infrastructure including Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js, and more. The Linux Foundation’s methodology focuses on leveraging best practices and addressing the needs of contributors, users and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit us at linuxfoundation.org.

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The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see our trademark usage page:  https://www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

Media Contact

Jennifer Cloer
for the Linux Foundation
503-867-2304
jennifer@storychangesculture.com

The post The Linux Foundation, Prometeo, IBM, and Partners Announce New Firefighter Safety Open Source Project appeared first on Linux Foundation.

Like many people, you might be thinking about a career in the fast growing field of cloud computing. It’s a smart move, with the Open Source Jobs Report finding that possessing cloud computing skills has the biggest impact on hiring decisions amongst technical hiring managers surveyed. And recent data have shown that job openings for cloud computing professionals have skyrocketed the last few years. 

The problem for most is determining how and where to start. If you are new to the IT sector, jumping straight into cloud and cloud native technologies is nearly impossible without first gaining an understanding of the infrastructure technologies on which the cloud is built. That’s why we’ve developed the roadmap below, outlining the knowledge and skills needed to successfully pursue a cloud career.

To start, you need to understand Linux. Over 90% of public cloud instances are running on Linux, and if you aren’t proficient in the Linux command line interface, you won’t get very far working in the cloud. You also need to understand DevOps – a term referring to the combination of development and operations which traditionally were separate in the IT space. The vast majority of organizations today use DevOps practices to deploy to the cloud, so you need to understand those practices. 

Once you’ve learned the fundamentals underpinning the cloud, you can start to learn the cloud technologies themselves. 91% of organizations running in the cloud are using Kubernetes, so it’s an ideal technology to focus on. 

To get your feet wet, you can start with some of our free courses:

Introduction to Linux
Introduction to DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering
Introduction to Cloud Infrastructure Technologies
Introduction to Kubernetes

After that, consider our Cloud Engineer Bootcamp if you want a more structured learning program, or check out our full array of cloud training and certification offerings. 

And don’t forget to view the Cloud Career Roadmap below for more insights!

Download full size version

The post Interested in a Cloud Computing Career? This Roadmap Can Point the Way appeared first on Linux Foundation – Training.