Get to know Eleni
This week’s Kubstronaut in Orbit, Eleni Grosdouli, brings diverse experiences to her role as a DevOps Consulting Engineer at Cisco Systems. She’s the go-to person for DevOps and Kubernetes Automation, with a passion for networking, security, endpoint management, and endpoint security,
If you’d like to be a Kubestronaut like Eleni, find more details on the CNCF Kubestronaut page.
When did you get started with Kubernetes–what was your first project?
My journey started back in 2019. At the time, I was a network consulting engineer involved in network automation projects. After learning about automation technologies, I was involved in container creation images and Docker. The next logical step was to work with an open source offering for container orchestration. That’s when I became familiar with Kubernetes. Setting up a home lab was just the beginning towards the exciting journey of the Kubestronaut certification.
What are the primary CNCF projects you work on or use today? What projects have you enjoyed the most in your career?
- Cilium as CNI and Service mesh
- Kyverno for applying policies
- Sveltos for Kubernetes add-on and applications deployment
- ArgoCD for continuous deployments on specific topics
- Kubebench, Trivy, Falco, Kubesec.io for security and compliance
- Prometheus, Grafana, Cortex for observability
How have the certs helped you in your career?
I would say a lot. As most certifications are hands-on, there is no way to pass the exam unless you know what you are doing. It is proof to your employees and the customers you interact with that you know what exactly you are talking about.
How has CNCF helped you or influenced your career?
Getting familiar with all these open source projects. Understanding how the community works and how I can assist in the efforts, was a mindset change!
What are some other books/sites/courses you recommend for people who want to work with k8s?
- All training material from Sander Van Vugt on O’Reilly Media
- The Kodekloud team for the DevOps track including the certification preparation material
- The ‘The Linux DevOps Handbook’ By Damian Wojsław, Grzegorz Adamowicz
- The ‘Learning Helm’ By Matt Butcher, Matt Farina, Josh Dolitsky
- The ‘Programming Kubernetes’ By Michael Hausenblas, Stefan Schimanski
- The ‘Getting Started with Grafana: Real-Time Dashboards for IT and Business Operations’ By Ronald McCollam
And many more!
What do you do in your free time?
I love nature and like to exercise! Usually, you will find me somewhere hiking and enjoying nature or practising rugby in a nearby local field. Spending quality time with family and friends is very important to me.
What would you tell someone who is just starting their K8s certification journey? Any tips or tricks?
Practise, practise, practise. Hands-on and working on projects is what will do the trick! Be confident to put yourself out there, surpass your limits and learn something new every day!
Today the cloud native ecosystem is way more than Kubernetes. Do you plan to get other cloud native certifications from the CNCF?
If it is hands-on, yes.
How did you get involved with cloud native and Kubernetes in general?
When I started working with Kubernetes back in 2019-2020.