With KubeCon and CloudNativeCon taking place in Copenhagen this week, it is not surprising that a series of Kubernetes-based announcements has hit the wires over the past 24 hours – with Cisco, Red Hat and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) taking top honours.
The CNCF, which maintains Kubernetes alongside other open source technologies, has announced the launch of a certified Kubernetes application developer (CKAD) examination, alongside a Kubernetes for Developers course.
The decision was made to expand the training and certification from administrators – more than 1,500 people have registered for the certified Kubernetes administrator (CKA) exam – to app developers. More than 700 developers have already signed up to beta test the CKAD exam, which is open to all entrants and costs $300.
The rationale behind the move is simple: as Kubernetes has grown and matured, so too has the demand for app developers who want to build projects on top of it. The CNCF cites figures from Indeed.com which showed that in March, 2% of all software engineer jobs posted on the portal demanded Kubernetes skills – a number which is only going to rise significantly.
At the Open Source Leadership Summit in March, Kubernetes became the first project to ‘graduate’ from the foundation, with CNCF saying the technology was ‘mature and resilient enough to manage containers at scale across any industry in companies of all sizes.’
Elsewhere, Cisco announced Kubernetes support for AppDynamics and Cisco CloudCenter to help enable greater enterprise adoption of the technology. Support with AppDyanmics will help organisations gain end-to-end visibility on performance metrics, as well as correlating Kubernetes performance with business metrics, while CloudCenter support focuses more on multi-cloud environments.
“The Kubernetes platform has emerged as the de facto container solution as customers accelerate adoption of containerised application architectures,” said Kip Compton, vice president of the Cisco Cloud Platform and Solutions Group. “But organisations are still challenged to efficiently and confidently utilise Kubernetes as they modernise legacy applications and develop new cloud applications.
“With our latest Kubernetes support, customers can now easily adopt production-grade Kubernetes across multi-cloud environments.”
Red Hat, meanwhile, has launched the Operator Framework alongside the Kubernetes open source community, to aid the building of applications on the platform. The move builds on Operators, an initiative put together in 2016 as a method of packaging, deploying and managing Kubernetes applications.
“We believe that the new Operator Framework represents the next big step for Kubernetes by using a baseline of leading practices to help lower the application development barrier on Kubernetes,” a blog post reads. “The project delivers an SDK and the ability to manage app installs and updates by using the lifecycle management mechanism, while enabling administrators to exercise operator capabilities on any Kubernetes cluster.”
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