It was all Greek to me 6 months ago- Cassandra, Kubernetes, Kyverno, Prometheus. As a classics enthusiast I was enchanted by all the mythology surrounding the K8s world, but had yet to see exactly what kind of Homeric adventure was in store.

The Data on Kubernetes Community found me more than I found it, and I was soon to learn how much was in this space. Operators, autoscaling, YAML, ETCD, Postgres, Ingres, loosely coupled workloads, stateful sets, OpenEBS, and that was just the tip of an ever-growing iceberg. If it was already tricky to explain what Kubernetes was, explaining what data on Kubernetes was all about to my family and friends was all the more challenging until I realized that at the end of the day what we’re often talking about are human concepts- frustration, trade-offs, confusion, loss, imposter syndrome. And the principal one for me is suffering. As the Buddhist adage teaches us “To live is to suffer, to suffer is to live.” The DoKC was born to alleviate that suffering.

In the very first podcast I did with Asier Azaceta who works on container security for IBM, he explained how much of what he does is culturally related. Getting developers and operators up to speed for the human changes they will have to make with their workflows rather than simply from a technical perspective. And six months later with Prashant from Devtron Labs he echoed the same message about the importance of having the right policies in place so that users can work more comfortably and with lower risks.

In the last six months we’ve seen incredible growth. Reaching 1000 followers on Linkedin, well over 500 on Slack, meetups planned from now until August, integration in the CNCF, a co-located event in Kubecon. We could modestly say that things are going well, but the definition of success here is about helping folks on their technical journey to embrace the new paradigm, what is becoming the “new normal” in an age where those words have more weight than ever.

How is that being done? Through the incredible speakers we’ve had from over a dozen countries generously sharing their knowledge so that other practitioners can improve. Speakers have included Jerome Petazzoni, Lili Cosic (RedHat), Jim Walker (CockroachDB), Alexander Kukushkin(Zalando), Álvaro Hernandez (Ongres), David McKay (Equinix). As every person has their own learning style, we try to offer a diverse array of options to do so including: questions in our Slack, visual resources in the form of animated videos, drawings, visual summaries of our meetups, and even through music.

This energy is being channeled into our co-located KubeCon event on May 3rd in which we will have various use cases being shared by practitioners and end-users in a full day event including talks from DataStax, Kubesphere, Flipkart, Percona, MayaData, Digital Ocean, and others. Serving as an international launchpad, the event will be a chance for us to show what our community is all about, and give it more structure, governance, breadth and depth.

It would be impossible for the community to be in the position it’s in right now without the tireless support from MayaData and more recently DataStax. The community is driven by a team of project managers, operators, and artists from different countries and of different ages giving it its own identity. We have proudly donated to The Last Mile and plan on continuing our collaboration with them in the future. Having been accepted as an ambassador in the CNCF, I have every intention of engaging that ecosystem as much as possible.

The next 6 months of this community will see meetups in different languages (Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Arabic, Hindi, Hebrew, French, and hopefully more), more engagement with young people, solidifying the learning journey to onboard folks, working on shared projects, getting interns- are some of the things on our roadmap.

This is still just the beginning. With the help of DataStax we’ve started to work with the CNCF on how to solidify the learning journey to make it easier to become an SRE/DBRE – and yes a CKDE may well be on the way (certified kubernetes data engineer). The door is always open for other individuals/companies interested in getting involved. You are always welcome in the DoKC.

For more information, contact [email protected]

Join the cloud native community at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2021 – Virtual from May 4-7 to further the education and advancement of cloud native computing.