Daniel Polencic is a certified Kubernetes Administrator. He teaches containers and Kubernetes at Learnk8s.
Daniel has recently featured in Onalytica's Who's Who in Cloud report.
How did you get to become an expert in Kubernetes?
I stumbled on Kubernetes by chance. While I was working for the UK Government, I noticed that most of the team struggled to understand how to use it. That led me to learn more and write content to help engineers get better at deploying. When I left the government, I thought other people could find the learning useful, so I continued writing blog posts and Twitter threads with the things I learned.
What cloud-native topics are you most passionate about?
Kubernetes is a vast subject, and there are several areas that people can branch into, such as networking, security, scaling, etc. However, I think the next major shift is in how we monitor and debug issues in applications. While we already see observability as a big topic in the industry, I believe this is just the beginning of a long journey. I’m genuinely excited to see this technology gaining mass adoption.
Who influences you on these topics?
Every month, I sift through thousands of links with content related to Kubernetes. From tutorials to press releases and new projects. That usually gives me a good idea of what topics are popular and what engineers are interested in. I typically combine the data with the questions I see appearing on social media and during our workshops. That usually informs me on what topic people struggle with and whether it’s worth pursuing.
What do you think the future holds for the Kubernetes ecosystem?
As Kubernetes adoption grows, I notice more consolidation around tooling and best practices. So if I had to take a conservative guess, I suspect the overall onboarding experience will gradually become smoother, and running clusters in production will lead to fewer surprises. On the other hand, I’m keeping an eye out for Web Assembly as it could positively affect what Kubernetes will be in the future.
What brands are leading the way in the cloud-native space?
Linux Foundation and CNCF have done a tremendous amount of work to make the entire ecosystem work. In Kubernetes space, a special shout-out goes to the Data on Kubernetes community that is truly putting the extra effort in to make Kubernetes (and data) more approachable.
What are your passions outside of work?
What would be the best way for a brand to contact you?
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