Get to know Eyal
This week’s Kubestronaut in Orbit, Eyal Zekaria is a Senior Cloud Architect in Berlin, Germany. Eyal has a DevOps and SRE background and has experience operating Kubernetes clusters at scale at different cloud providers. In his current role he helps other companies in their cloud journey. Outside of Kubernetes, Eyal is also interested in automation and open source software.
If you’d like to be a Kubestronaut like Eyal, get more details on the CNCF Kubestronaut page.
When did you get started with Kubernetes and/or cloud-native? What was your first project?
The company I worked for in 2017 was using Mesos/Marathon to run their microservices — after evaluating Kubernetes, we started moving services over one by one.
What are the primary CNCF projects you work on or use today? What projects have you enjoyed the most in your career?
Besides the components that are built into Kubernetes, I think that cert-manager, Open Policy Agent (OPA), and Prometheus are the ones I like the most.
How have the certs or CNCF helped you in your career?
Getting the certifications helped me bridge gaps in my knowledge. My experience has been predominantly using managed Kubernetes services where many aspects are taken out of your control for the sake of convenience – which is great, but it can also be detrimental when trying to understand how things work internally.
What are some other books/sites/courses you recommend for people who want to work with k8s?
“Kubernetes the Hard Way” by Kelsey Hightower is awesome, as well as anything by Kelsey, but I find the preparation for all Kubernetes-related CNCF certifications very useful as well.
What do you do in your free time?
Play tennis, or any other racket sports.
What would you tell someone who is just starting their K8s certification journey? Any tips or tricks?
Create a sandbox cluster and start getting comfortable interacting with it. Break it, fix it, enable and disable different features.
Then start experimenting with running workloads in it, including all the involved aspects.