 Hi everyone, welcome back today, two of the Kubernetes community days Africa event. We had a great day yesterday, awesome talks and great conversations that happened yesterday. And today we're going to be having more yesterday was mainly for tutorials and more deep dive kind of content. While today is going to be more about talks, people sharing, use cases, sharing experiences, sharing lessons, the lens, building different things. And we have quite a lot of great conversations that are going to be happening today. So stay tuned and join us throughout the rest of the day. You can view the link, the video for yesterday. We have the recording for the whole event yesterday on our YouTube channel, just search for KCD Africa will be sharing the links subsequently. Then at the end of the whole event, we are going to break each of the live stream into individual sessions so that you can watch them on demand on the KCD Africa YouTube channel. I will also be uploading it to the CNCF channel also. Well first introductions, I am Abu Bakr Siddiq Angu, developer evangelizing program manager at GitLab and a co-organizer of the Kubernetes community days Africa. And co-hosting with me is Anita. Hey everyone, I am Anita Heyman, I'm a developer advocate and technical writer and an open source advocate as well. So it's good to see you here once more. Yeah, awesome. Well, first before we start, we have a very great keynote style. We will be having a couple of minutes, but before we start, we would like to share some words from some of our partners. Now we, one of our partner is local host. Local host is a DevOps, SRE cloud community, previously known as DevOps Nigeria and with members spread across labels of wood Nigeria, Germany, London and basically all over the world. And local host will be hosting an annual conference later this year, I think November in Lagos, Nigeria, which you don't want to miss it to be a convergence of cloud DevOps and SRE experts from across the globe. So if you want more details, you can see the fly on the screen, bit.ly slash local host conference, but we'll also be sharing a link in chat for the conference. So make sure you go register and attend the event. It's going to be awesome. Definitely. Though I'll be missing it because I'm not enjoying it. But you all should go participate and be a part of it. Now also we let me share my screen. Also, one of our partners is digital ocean and digital ocean. You might have been hearing about digital ocean to provide affordable and efficient cloud services. We are we are we are here all talking about cloud talking about cloud native, it is an ocean is one of the providers that you can use to achieve your infrastructure or your DevOps or SRE goals. And some of the services that digital ocean provides are droplets, which are basically your compute instances virtual versions that you can use to run any type of workload. I use digital ocean quite often and I'm also a digital ocean navigator, it's like community of digital ocean and enthusiast. So drop you can have very type of droplets in different locations. I know they have a data center in London, I know of New York, I know of India, forgotten time India. So depending on where you want to host your content, I personally use Amsterdam often because I'm close to Amsterdam. So you can get awesome compute instances on digital ocean. Now there's also managed databases, there's spaces, I love using spaces, because oftentimes I connected to my droplets, like using, so it appears like a volume and I can back up my files seamlessly or store logs, archive logs there. Also, we're all talking about communities. Digital ocean has a managed community service where it's awesome to use the seamless and you can run your workloads. Now, other things that are provided are load balancers block storage and one click apps. Sometimes you don't want to go through the stress of having to set up the virtual machine, install all the necessary services required, and so on before you deploy applications. Digital ocean allows you to just click a button and it's deployed, everything you need is deployed. So like I said, they have data centers across the globe, San Francisco, Toronto, New York, London, Amsterdam, Frankfurt. Yeah, Bangalore was the name I was looking for, and Singapore. So you can, which means you can put your workload in regions where most likely close us to you. I think London and Amsterdam are kind of closer. I think London is kind of closer to Nigeria in terms of undersea cable that run from Lagos, so you can definitely check it out. And one of the good things of hosting your droplets in the same form experience and use of digital ocean of hosting your instances in the same data center is you can enjoy private networking and transfer workloads between your instances without having to incur bandwidth costs of moving data across different data centers. So you definitely check digital ocean outs and why do customers love digital ocean simplicity? It's very simple. You're just going to click a few minutes, you have your droplets. Yeah, other cloud providers have a lot of services that they're providing. Sometimes it can be like, yeah, moving through a maze just to understand what is going on. You can go with digital ocean. Everything is very simple, very clean design, and you can have access to everything you need within very few clicks. Now, for these events, you can enjoy $100. $100 is not small money. $100 is like $60,000 black market. So you can enjoy a 60 day free trial to experiment with a lot of things. I think one of the smallest digital ocean droplets is $5. So that's like, you can have 20 droplets, create your notes, run your cluster, costume clusters if you are trying to do something the hard way. So you can scan this QR code or use this URL or drop in the URL in the chat so you can try digital ocean art. If you have any questions, you can ask in chat or you can join our KCD Africa channel in the CNCF Slack for more composition. Yep. So don't add the messages from our sponsors and shortly we'll be starting our keynote. So how was your day yesterday? Well, we're here to get our yesterday Anita, so I basically know how your day went. I think I went to bed immediately and left this chair. I didn't because in the middle of the stream, most the user has this actuality. I got some deliveries from IKEA. So my daughter has been disturbing me. I bought a blackboard for her to be writing and doing a lot of things. Even while she was ongoing, she was busy disturbing me. Yeah, daddy, let's fix it. I want to write. Yeah. In the background yesterday. Yeah, exactly. So we spent, I think, like an hour or two setting the things up and making sure it's she's able to use it. And also I she has a tablet. I set time limit on our tablets from 12 noon to 9 p.m. What is 9 p.m. Or if she has used it to those six hours, you should just shut off. So she came kept disturbing me. Her phone is not working. Her phone is not going to write. You've passed your limit. It would not work. That's cool though. Yeah, because that's really cool. Yeah, I need to reduce her screen time. She learns a lot. But if it's getting too much, it's it's going to be bad. Yeah, so awesome. I think that's enough of we catching up. So I think we'll be proceeding with our keynote keynote speaker is Eddie Dion. I think I need to can introduce her better than I do. Okay, sure. All right. So today we have our keynote speaker who is going to be Eddie Dion. And if you don't know Eddie Dion already she checked with her because she's really popular on there. Yeah, she's a developer advocate at Ambassador Labs and she is in when it comes to advocacy for open source projects and most cloud native technologies as well. So over to Eddie Dion. Okay, me. Can anybody hear me? Yes, we can hear you clearly. Okay, can you hear me? I know I was telling you about the fun that I had to turn on. Is it like sounding okay about that? Do I need to turn it off? Yeah, it sounds perfect. You sound perfect. Okay, that means the headphones actually good. Awesome. All right, cool. Should I go ahead and start? Okay, I guess as soon as you guys are off. Hi everyone. My name is Eddie Dion. But people call me Eddie. I realize that it's quite hard to pronounce. So if you cannot pronounce Eddie then did he is like the next best option. So I am pretty much going to share my story where I'm going to talk about how I joined the cloud native ecosystem, my learning process and how it has been so far. I know this keynote speech of us in the last 15 minutes, so I will try to be as fast as possible, but that also include all of the details there. And as always, if you have any questions, you can just drop it in the chat and I will respond to them after I'm done with the quick story about my cloud native journey. This is officially started when I used to work at this company called Inter Switch. Maybe I can't remember the exact name like 2018 or 2019-ish kind of emotion of the exact year, but the company was like structured into different sections, right? There was the software engineering team, there was the DevOps team, there was like the marketing team and all of the stuff. And then we had like different subsections as well. So each like software engineering department, so to speak, had like a DevOps present, right? So I used to work in the research and development software engineering team. And then so we had this DevOps person as well who used to like help us with deploying our applications and just checking it to ensure that nothing goes wrong. And then I think we used to sit down first to each other. So you'd hear him often talk about like Kubernetes or Kibana or something is going wrong. And then it was just very interesting that it was just very interesting the way he explained it, right? And the way people would always come up to him and say, hey, can you help me fix this problem? My application is down. I cannot access it anymore. I tried to do that. And then just watching the thought process he usually followed to like implement or try to get your application back up. And then the excitement that came about after your application eventually came back up. So it just seemed like a very exciting thing to do, right? But I was like, okay, this is cool. And maybe someday in life I would eventually like transition into like learning about Kubernetes and all of those things. Because at the time I was just focused on web development. So, I mean, it didn't happen immediately. I went and I joined another company from Interstreet. I joined Hash Node and continued working in like the web development space, of course, as a developer advocate. And then so I tie back to like KCD Africa, right? It was like KCD Africa event that happened in that year as well when I did an interview with Priyanka, right? It was more of an AMA session. So I was asking her a couple of questions and she was sharing the context with it. And then that was like the second time I had another encounter with like Kubernetes and cloud native through the first KCD Africa event. So it was just like reiterating the initial attraction I had to reach at Interstreet. And having a conversation with Priyanka, just learning about her journey, the things she was doing. And how she got into the open source space and how she also transitioned to cloud native was also very inspiring for me and for me. And then I was like, um, sorry, just give me one second. Can it seems, can you see me? Seems like I'm saying you can't see me. Oh, okay. It seems it's okay now. Alright, so like I was saying, having the conversation with Priyanka was very inspiring, right? And that just helped me to think about that initial attraction that I had to Kubernetes when I first heard about it at Interstreet. And again, it just made me feel like, okay, maybe I should actually do this thing someday. But you know the fear that comes with moving from something you are very comfortable with, right? To like something else. It's like very, very scary. So imagine maybe building yourself and being good to a certain level in the web development space. And then you don't have to transition to like, let's say, let's say Android development or cloud native. It's very scary. I don't know if any of you think it's scary. But for me, it was like literally going to start somewhere else as a beginner instead of continuing the field that you've already like maybe built up to like learned up to a certain level. So I just kept like maybe whenever it came up, I was just like, now I'll just like move it away and focus on what I was currently doing. So the opportunity came to work at Ambassador Labs, which is my current company. And again, it just felt like maybe it was, you know, I don't know if any of you believe it fits. But it just felt like it was maybe fit, I think, because everything was just kind of aligning towards me moving to this field. So like the first packet in test which like hosting the AMA session with Bianca at KCity Africa. And then a job opportunity to like join the Kubernetes space, right. And then it was just like, okay, maybe I should actually try out this like field and see how it goes. And the company was willing to give me like the first like first month to just focus on learning. When I joined Ambassador Labs, I didn't go straight up into like working immediately was just focused on learning about Kubernetes and other cloud native technologies to get like a certain a certain level of understanding pretty much. And then eventually transition into working as a developer advocate in the cloud native space. So that's a quick summary of how I got into cloud native from the spark to another spark, I think, and then eventually making the decision. I'm going to share my learning journey and how it has been so far. So next week Tuesday is actually going to make it officially one year since I joined Ambassador Labs as soon as I transition into cloud native. So I'm going to talk to like my learning journey and like how it has been so far things have been able to achieve the things I'm looking forward to achieving and the struggles are faced so far pretty much. So in terms of learning journey, like I mentioned the first month at the company was just focused on learning. So I had, I was added into like the more like I was merged with an engineering manager in the support team, where he like pretty much like helps me understand things I wasn't comfortable with. And then how we worked was like certain courses I need I needed to go through certain things I needed to learn, right. And after I learned those things I would go back to him and say, Hey, this is what I know now this what I'm struggling with. And it was just more like a conversation to get me up to a certain point where I was more comfortable. But in regards to learning I think for me what I did was try to be very specific with the things I wanted to learn is more like having a roadmap of like, what do I need to know to know this right. So in order to fully understand Kubernetes, you need to understand containers, you need to understand microservices need to understand Docker before you fully understand how Kubernetes works. For other people, maybe they'll just jump straight into learning Kubernetes without all of these other things. But the way my brain works I usually like to take things in steps is like, I need to know this first. And then move to the next thing, because that would help me have like a better flow of of that concept or that technology was trying to learn. So what I did was try to like, understand, I mean, I did have some fair knowledge of containers, but it just had to like go deeper into understanding what containers meant, diving into like microservices, then doing a couple of stuffs with Docker and then eventually transitioning to Kubernetes. And then on the Kubernetes phase, I don't know, like, I'm still most of you here know, Kubernetes is actually very, I mean, I would say it's actually, maybe one of the most complicated things I have learned in the sense that there was just so many things I've learned, right? So today I could probably start and then I know what Kubernetes is, I started learning about ports, and then I've been able to like expose the port and assess it externally. And then all of a sudden I'm happy. I'm like, yeah, I don't know this. And then you realize you don't need to also know about services, because ports are not very efficient since they die, like since the, their ID changes when they die. So you know, learn about services, you're excited that you know about service and how to make it work. And then you realize that no, you also need to learn about deployment. So it was just a constant journey of being happy that I know this, and then feeling that I don't know enough. And they're wanting to learn more. I don't even anybody cares about how to experience where you, let's say you've always wanted to understand something or you want to reach a certain level. But when you reach that level, you know, feel like, I mean, you don't, you don't focus on the, the, the, the positive part of reaching that level, you're not like, oh, hey, I need to read the next step or I need, I need that I have so much more to do. So it was always like that for me and to be honest, that's not the best way to think about it, right? It's always very important to like appreciate or think about like the great things you've done to reach a certain level, like think about those awesome way and how you've been able to learn this and how you've been able to learn that instead of just focusing on like moving straight up to the next thing. Of course, it's good to have a balance and like move on to reach a point where you're overly like comfortable with the technology. But I guess what I'm trying to say there is tell you're learning to what steps, right? Think of where you want to, think of what you want to achieve. And then right now I'm breaking down steps that will help you achieve that thing. So instead of saying, let's use web development for an instance, right? So instead of saying, hey, I want to be, I want to be a web developer in like one month. Or let's say I want to be a web developer in like six months. That's like a good overall goal. But the ideal thing you should do is, what do I want to do in like this specific month before it's up to six months? Do I want to be able to let's say build a like an HTML page first? Do I want to be able to like maybe know how to use CSS to do this? Pretty much tailoring your learning process just helps you feel better because when you can tie down the little wins. So instead of saying, I want to be an expert in Kubernetes, I want to know every single thing in Kubernetes. It starts with I just want, I want to be able to just deploy an application to Kubernetes, right? And then when you eventually reach that point, you're like, okay, hey, I can do this. There was a time in your life where you literally didn't know what Kubernetes was or how to even do any of those things. So you can then focus on that like win that you have. And it would just pretty much make it better for you. So in addition to breaking down the things I needed to learn, another thing I tried to do was like share my learning journey or process in public. I mean, I didn't do, I didn't do it as much as I wanted to. I actually wanted to be like maybe tweeting about it every time, writing so many articles about it, right? But then I didn't do as much as I wanted to to be honest, but I tried to some certain level. I believe that writing like sharing knowledge is always a great way to reinforce your learning, even though people think of it as hey, I'm writing to teach this person or I'm switching to teach this person. It also helps you understand something a lot better, right? Because in order for you to fully explain something for someone else to understand, it means you need to understand it very well. So in every process or in every time you're trying to write an article or learning in public, you're pretty much helping yourself become better at that technology, right? Before helping the other person. So I really tried, I tried to do that as much as I could. I didn't do it, I didn't reach the level I wanted to in terms of like being very open with like my learning journey, but I mean, I tried. And that's all that matters, rather than doing nothing. And the final thing I did in terms of learning was be very keen in asking questions. I understood that this was a field that I was new in, right? I mean, when you post that syndrome of leaving web developers and coming here, it was like, I was starting tech all over again, I was just starting tech for the first time. You know how that feeling where you feel very clueless about so many things. So that's pretty much how I felt. And I knew that one way to overcome that was to like ask people questions. And thankfully I had like a lot of people in my support system who were willing to answer questions from like my friends, my manager at work, the manager I worked with in the support team, my devil manager, Daniel. There were like a lot of people that I could always ask questions to. I've even reached out to people on Twitter as well, including Siam, like so many of them. And then I just knew that it was okay to ask questions. I was comfortable with looking dumb to somebody just to understand what I needed to understand. And I think that's a very important thing for us to note because you can't always know everything really. And you need to be very open or willing enough to like ask people questions, be open to like saying, Hey, I don't know this thing, but I want to know this thing. Can you help me with a certain point? And I think those three things were generally what helped me reach a certain level of understanding like Kubernetes and cloud native technologies. Of course, I still have so much more to learn. But three things breaking down my learning journey, what I needed to do to get to a certain point, learning in public and also asking questions really helped me reach a very comfortable point in my cloud native journey. And of course, I'm so looking at learning, learning more. Yeah, so that's all for a learning journey. And then, like I mentioned, next 50 is going to make it one year. So I just, I just want to maybe look back on like some things that I have been able to do. And then I think the reason why I'm saying this, the reason why I'm saying this is because I want you to know that it's okay to transition to a new field. It's okay to come into the cloud native ecosystem. Trust me, there are like so many people who are like willing to help you get to that point that you want to be. There are people sharing knowledge on Twitter, on LinkedIn, on, on like YouTube, there is like the Kubernetes Slack channel as well, which will pretty much help you like get up to speed in your cloud native journey. So some of the key highlights, some of the things that I've done in like one year is I think the coolest one for me is speaking at KubeCon, like we just concluded at KubeCon. It was absolutely fantastic because I joined, I joined the cloud native ecosystem, let's say three or four months before the, like I experienced the first KubeCon, and it was just exciting to see people speak at the event and just like share knowledge. And for me, who is someone who has always loved to share knowledge, it was really nice to be given that opportunity to speak at one of the, I think it's the biggest Kubernetes and cloud native conference in the world. It was like, literally one of the best things that happened. And then I also passed my SICAT exams. So SICAT exams is a certification by the Linux Foundation and CNCA. Pretty much helps you like reinforce your learnings or just look through things that you've not really understood. It was like a great learning process for me as well. It helped me learn a lot of things that I did not know prior to like practicing or preparing for the exams and just having the certification was also a good feeling to have. It also helped me remind, like it reminded me that, yeah, I did start sometime last year, but I now knew enough to be able to like pass a certification exam that a lot of people have taken over the past years. So that was really nice for me. And then at the company that I worked with hosted a couple of Kubernetes workshops, written a couple of articles that are centered around cloud native and Kubernetes. And we've just been at the point where we're like sharing knowledge about different things. And I have participated in all of those things. Of course, sharing knowledge is great to teach other people. But again, it also helps you become a better person at the thing you're learning or just become a better communicator in terms of passing knowledge and all of that. So that's a quick summary. I don't think I've passed 15 minutes or I'm close to 15 minutes. But in summary, I joined the cloud ecosystem last year, and it's almost going to be a year and it's been a fantastic journey. I have had so much to learn. I still have so much more to learn. But the community, the members of the community have been very supportive. And if you're also willing to transition to cloud native or just kickstart a new field in tech or someone who is in DevOps or a cloud native engineer or a Kubernetes engineer or whatever field you want to focus in cloud native space, it is absolutely possible for you to do that. And in order for you to do that, I recommend that you try to learn in public because it helps people know that you're now in that space. Prior to Kubernetes and cloud native and DevOps, I used to talk about web development and technical writing a lot. And if I wasn't very intentional about sharing my learning experiences on Twitter or something, you probably still think I am still doing web development and I'll most likely not be giving this keynote speech today. So I absolutely recommend learning in public. And I know that some people think that maybe they're not smart enough to share something online or they don't really have a lot of information that other people have. But I love to use this analogy that imagine if you've been in a certain tech space for one month, right? There are people who have been in that same space for two weeks or maybe just one week. And the information you have is someone who has been there for one month will be very beneficial to someone who has just joined less than one day ago or one week ago. And your information can be very useful to that person. Other than that, as a beginner in a certain field, there's certain context that you have that an expert might not have. So most times you'll be able to explain things in a way that other people can easily relate to as opposed to an expert who assumes that people may already know that thing. So I'm very keen on sharing your knowledge in public. It's absolutely fantastic. It gives you great opportunities and also helps people in the ecosystem know that you're not part of the, you're not part of like cloud native or doing things around cloud native technologies. So yeah, thank you. I hope that maybe you've realized that it's absolutely okay for you to join the cloud native space. It's fantastic. It has lots of opportunities and it's literally just waiting for you to join and help in spreading the word as well. Thank you. Oh, that was a great story, Dee Dee. Yeah, and it's always inspiring to actually hear your journey because I think we started this journey like about the same year and you have done really, really amazing things. We do.