Research Paper: Building a Modern Data Platform Based on the Data Lakehouse Architecture and Cloud-Native Ecosystem

Finally, after months of hard work, I have published my first research paper in a double-blind peer-reviewed scientific journal by the international publisher Springer Nature 🙌

The paper is titled:

Building a Modern Data Platform Based on the Data Lakehouse Architecture and Cloud-Native Ecosystem

This research paper is the result of several months of work and is based on my master's thesis, which was published in 2023 (I got Master of Science with Distinction in Data Engineering from Edinburgh Napier University).

The paper presents a practical application for data management without vendor lock-in, in addition to ensuring platform extensibility and incorporating modern concepts such as Cloud-Native, Cloud-Agnostic, and DataOps.

Why is this paper important? Because data is the backbone of Artificial Intelligence! In today's world, control over data means political and economic independence.

I would like to extend my sincere gratitude to the research team who contributed to this work, supported me, and shared their knowledge to help bring this paper to the highest quality. It was a truly enriching experience on many levels! 🙌

• Dr. Peter Barclay: Head of the Data Engineering program at the School of Computing, Edinburgh Napier University.
• Dr. Nikolaos Pitropakis, PhD: Associate Professor of Cybersecurity at the School of Computing, Edinburgh Napier University.
• Dr. Christos Chrysoulas: Associate Professor in Software Engineering at Heriot-Watt University.

The research group chose these quotes from our respective languages/cultures to emphasize the importance of perseverance and diligence:

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“عِندَ الصَّباحِ يَحمَدُ القومُ السُّرَى”
(In the morning, the people praise the night's journey)
Arabic Proverb

“Αρχή ήμισυ παντός”
(The beginning is half of everything)
Greek Proverb

“Is obair latha tòiseachadh”
(Beginning is a day's work)
Scottish Gaelic Proverb

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I will write a community blog post about it soon :-)

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2024 Highlights

Finally, 2024 is over! Another crazy year but I like it! 🤩 This year was a bit chill compared to previous ones, but also I did many new things.

Top 5 highlights in 2024

1. Career

In 2022, I formed the Distribution team at Camunda, which is responsible for building and deploying the Camunda Platform 8 Self-Managed, which is an umbrella Helm chart with 10+ systems. In 2023, the main mission was to increase the team size to 4. In 2024, the onboarding was done for all members, and the team became more autonomous and worked at full capacity. I like the process of building and leading the team and am excited for the next steps in 2025. 🤩

2. Dynamic DevOps Roadmap

In 2023, I wrote why the DevOps linear roadmaps are broken by default and then sow the seed of the Dynamic DevOps Roadmap to become a DevOps Engineer.

In 2024, I finished 100% of the roadmap and launched the roadmap website, making reading and following progress much easier. I'm pretty happy that many people like the approach of that roadmap instead of other roadmaps that list tons of DevOps tools! (which doesn't really work!). Here are some other highlights:

• The roadmap repo got more than 1.6k stars on GitHub.
• Added around 250 quiz questions (embedded in each module).
• Added around 200 general interview questions.
• Added interview best practices, which are the same as important as technical skills.

Experience-Driven DevOps: Beyond Tools, Where Concepts Meet Real-World Challenges

A FREE pragmatic DevOps roadmap to kickstart your DevOps career in the Cloud Native era following the Agile MVP style! A DevOps Engineer or Software Engineer, this roadmap is all that you need to start, grow, and expand!

3. Public Speaking

This year, I conducted some nice sessions (in Arabic) with awesome people.

As usual, JobStack_ continues to set the bar higher each year! It is an unmissable event for tech enthusiasts. I really enjoyed participating as both a speaker and a listener. 🤩

In November, I had 2 sessions, the kick-off and another specialized in DevOps.

• ⭐ Kick off - Welcome to JobStack 2024
• ⭐ DevOps Engineer Kit in 2025 with Ahmed Elfakharany.

Also, in December, I participated in a live podcast with Ahmed Elemam covering ⭐ How to start with the Dynamic DevOps Roadmap.

4. Activities

Besides these highlights, I had some nice stuff during the year. For example:

• Updated my main website aabouzaid.com, listed my projects, blog posts, publications, tech talks, and more.
• Traveled to 3 countries, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and Dominican Republic to attend tech and work-related events. I also had the chance to meet a lot of friends in those travels. Saudi Arabia wasn't my first time there, but the last time was too long ago, happy to be back again. 🤩
• After 5 years of OnePlus 6, I got a new phone. First, I tried for a couple of months Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra, a great device but super heavy! So I swtiched to Samsung Galaxy S24, which is high-quality and perfect in size.
• Since 2020, I've been using the ergonomic mouse (standard vertical) and keyboard (Microsoft Sculpt) and totally like them. Recently, I changed the mouse to Logitech MX Vertical. It's pretty good for me; my only concern is that the clicks are a bit noisy!
• Lost some weight, which is great 😄

And since we are on this topic, here are the top 5 visited blog posts in 2024!

Top 5 posts in 2024

1. 2 ways to route Ingress traffic across namespaces - Kubernetes
2. How to create Makefile targets with dynamic parameters and autocompletion - Make
3. Validate, format, lint, secure, and test Terraform IaC - CI/CD
4. Your DevOps learning roadmap is broken! - Career
5. 3 ways to customize off-the-shelf Helm charts with Kustomize - Kubernetes

Almost the same as last year, 2023, DevOps, Kubernetes, and Kustomize posts are still in the top.

What's next?

As usual, I don't plan the whole year in advance, I just put some high-level directions then work on them as I go in Agile iterative style (yes, I use Agile for personal goals too).

What I know, I will focuse on growing the Dynamic DevOps Roadmap community and work on the Career Growth and Advanced Topics section.

Previous Years

• 2023 Highlights
• 2022 Highlights

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Enjoy, and looking forward to 2024! 🤩

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Bootstrap Cloud-Native bootstrappers like Crossplane with K3d - Automation

I created a logo for the Crossplane Bootstrapper because all good projects deserve a logo. 😁

TL;DR

• Question: How to bootstrap bootstrappers? e.g., Argo CD and Crossplane, etc.
  Answer: Use K3d (v5.7 and above) with embedded files! Or just use Crossplane Bootstrapper!

My contribution to K3d to support embedded files was one of the smoothest open-source contributions, although I needed to refactor my PR fully! I did that happily, thanks to the fruitful discussion with the K3d creator and maintainer, Thorsten Klein 🙌

Let's dive into that a bit more using the STAR method.

Situation

It has always been challenging to initiate the initiator dilemma (the same as Infinite regress in philosophy). For example, what will monitor the monitoring system? Or What will backup the backup system?

The same applies to Cloud-Native tools that run only on Kubernetes, where you need an initial Kubernetes cluster to run those bootstrapping tools to create your resources (like Argo CD and Crossplane).

Task

I wanted to fix this issue once and for all! (a generic way that works with many tools) I found that the best way to do that is to have a declarative way to setup the initial local cluster, which will create the Cloud resources afterward.

Action

I've reviewed a couple of tools and found the best tool to achieve that is K3d, a wrapper around K3s, a Rancher's lightweight Kubernetes distribution. It's like KIND but way more customizable (e.g., it comes with a built-in Helm controller).

In March 2024, I made a K3d PR that added functionality to embed manifests in the K3d cluster configuration. Now, we can have one file to bootstrap the local cluster with bootstrapping tools ready to provision your Cloud resources.

In July 2024, K3d 5.7.0 was released with my feature, so I can use it to bootstrap Crossplane instead of a bunch of Makefiles.

I also created Crossplane Bootstrapper, which makes that process even easier.

Result

With my new feature, it's possible to have 1 YAML file using 1 tool to bootstrap the initial cluster, which will create the reset of your Cloud resources.

Here is an example from Crossplane Bootstrapper. That solution works with any tool (e.g., Argo CD). It also supports external files, which is better for linting and so on.

---
apiVersion: k3d.io/v1alpha5
kind: Simple
metadata:
  name: crossplane-bootstrapper

# Cluster resources.
servers: 1
agents: 1

# Auto deployed manifests.
files:
  - description: Setup Crossplane
    destination: k3s-manifests/crossplane-bootstrapper.yaml
    nodeFilters:
      - "server:*"
    # Source as a file.
    # source: manifest-crossplane-bootstrapper.yaml
    # Source as an embedded manifest.
    source: |
      ---
      apiVersion: v1
      kind: Namespace
      metadata:
        name: crossplane-system
      ---
      # Install Crossplane.
      apiVersion: helm.cattle.io/v1
      kind: HelmChart
      metadata:
        name: crossplane
        namespace: crossplane-system
      spec:
        repo: https://charts.crossplane.io/stable
        chart: crossplane
        targetNamespace: crossplane-system
        valuesContent: |-
          provider:
            packages:
            # Docs: https://marketplace.upbound.io/providers/upbound/provider-family-gcp
            - "xpkg.upbound.io/upbound/provider-gcp-gke:v1.0.2"
          configuration:
            packages:
            # Docs: https://marketplace.upbound.io/configurations/upbound/platform-ref-gcp
            - "xpkg.upbound.io/upbound/platform-ref-gcp:v0.9.0"
      ---
[...]

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That's it! Happy DevOpsing :-)

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Gomplate v4 is here! - Tools

This year, one of my nice discoveries was gomplate, a fast template renderer supporting many data sources and hundreds of functions.

And finally, gomplate v4 was released in June 2024. It has many excellent new features and additions (v3 was released in 2018!).

I will not really cover much here as it has extensive documentation. The most basic example could be:

echo 'Hello, {{ .Env.USER }}' | gomplate
Hello, ahmed

But I totally like the idea of the separation between data input (data source) and rendering, so I can generate the data with any tool and then just leave the rendering to gomplate like:

Template file:

{{- $release := ds "release" -}}
{{- with $release -}}
Version: .version
{{- end -}}

Rendering command:

RELEASE_DATA_JSON='{"version": "1.0.0"}'
gomplate \
    --config .gomplate.yaml \
    --file RELEASE.md.tpl \
    --datasource release=env:///RELEASE_DATA_JSON?type=application/json

Of course, that's still super basic, but the idea here is that I could generate the data of env var RELEASE_DATA_JSON or even generate a JSON file and read it in gomplate.

What's better? It's already available in asdf! Just add it directly or declaratively via asdf plugin manager.

asdf plugin-add gomplate

If you want a decent tool for templating, then gomplate is your tool to go.

Enjoy :-)

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Do NOT use unpackaged Helm charts! - DevOps

TL;DR

Don't install/template from unpackaged Helm charts directly because Helm CLI has many bugs related to packaging and dependencies, especially bug no. helm/helm #11484 and you will get unexpected behavior.

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2023 Highlights

Image generated with Craiyon.

Finally, 2023 is over! What a year! One more crazy year, but it was the culmination of many actions I've started previously.

Starting with the fun facts ... this is the post no. 100!

After 9 years of tech blogging in English (I had another 10 in Arabic before that). It should be 108 posts since the plan was to post 1 per month, but I missed some, still not bad!

Top 5 highlights in 2023

1. Career

Image by vectorjuice on Freepik

In 2022, I formed the Distribution team at Camunda which is responsible for building and deploying the Camunda Platform 8 Self-Managed which is an umbrella Helm chart with 10+ systems. In 2023, the biggest challenge was increasing the team headcount to 4 and building the workflow to handle that!

2. Academia

I've always been into data! So in 2020, I started a part-time master's in Data Engineering at Edinburgh Napier University. After almost 3 years, I was awarded a Master of Science with Distinction in Data Engineering 🎉. In June, I got the result after I successfully defended my dissertation titled Modern Data Platform with DataOps, Kubernetes, and Cloud-Native Ecosystem. Then in October, I traveled to Scotland to attend the graduation ceremony. All I can say today is that it was a great experience by all means! (and that's actually why I had some unusual gaps in blog posts in 2023 because I was working on the master's thesis).

3. Mentorship

In the last 5 years, I mentored many people in different career stages (starting their first job, career shift, moving to another work style or company). Almost every day, I see people struggling on their way to the DevOps field. I already wrote why the DevOps linear roadmaps are broken by default! So I decided to fix that and launched a Dynamic DevOps Roadmap to become a DevOps Engineer which under the DevOps Hive identity! The nice thing that I saw many people already like the idea and want to do it that way!

ℹ️ Check out the Dynamic Roadmap content ℹ️

4. Public Speaking

Jobstack is one of my favorite tech events all the time! And as usual, this year was awesome! As a speaker, I had 2 sessions, and as an attendee, I enjoyed many sessions on different topics.

• Platform Engineering: Manage your infrastructure using Kubernetes and Crossplane
• DevOps is not only a culture.

5. Activities

Besides these highlights, I had some nice stuff during the year. For example:

• Developed 2 Kustomize plugins in Golang which are Merger (a schemaless strategic merge plugin) and KubeconformValidator (A plugin built around Kubeconform to validate manifests schema within Kusomize).
• Developed ASDF Plugin Manager, a plugin manager for the asdf version manager!
• Like Kustomize Awesome list, I've created Crossplane Awesome list too!

And since we are on this topic, here are the top 5 visited blog posts in 2023!

Top 5 posts in 2023

1. 2 ways to route Ingress traffic across namespaces - Kubernetes
2. Validate, format, lint, secure, and test Terraform IaC - CI/CD
3. Your DevOps learning roadmap is broken! - Career
4. Delete a manifest from Kustomize base - Kubernetes
5. 3 ways to customize off-the-shelf Helm charts with Kustomize - Kubernetes

The same as last year, 2022, Kustomize posts are still in the top; that's because there is not much content about it even though it's built-in kubectl now! (since v1.14). That's why I created a Kustomize Awesome list, which is a curated and collaborative list of awesome Kustomize resources.

But this year, 2023, for the first time, a blog post posted in the same year appears in the top 5 posts! Which is discussing how the linear DevOps learning roadmap is broken by default! That's why I had a follow-up post showing the solution that suggests a better way to Become a DevOps Engineer with the Dynamic DevOps Roadmap. ⭐

What's next?

As usual, I don't plan the whole year in advance, I just put some high-level directions then work on them as I go in Agile iterative style (yes, I use Agile for personal goals too).

What I know already is that I need to reward myself and take a good break after the master 😁

Also, I want to put more effort to grow the DevOps Hive community to help more people to land their first DevOps Engineer role!

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Enjoy, and looking forward to 2024!

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Become a DevOps Engineer with the Dynamic DevOps Roadmap - Career

A couple of months ago, I discussed why all linear DevOps learning roadmaps are broken by default (like roadmap.sh/devops)! In that post, I've discussed the issue, where it comes from, and the solution I tried for over 5 years!

The solution is simply switching to an MVP-style learning roadmap where you learn in iterations and touch multiple parts simultaneously (not necessarily equally). Each iteration should focus on a primary topic while exploring related side topics. So after a month, you already know about each topic in the roadmap, and after the 2nd month, you have the basics, and after the 3rd month, you have a good base, and so on.

Based on my mentorship experience in the last 5 years, I've concluded that any "tool-based" approach to deal with DevOps will fail miserably. The Cloud-Native landscape is getting bigger and bigger every day, and there is no way to deal with it that way.

For that reason, I've reviewed all docs from the previous mentorship docs I held in the past (I worked with people starting their first job, career shift, or moving to another work style or company) and built the ultimate missing solution!

⭐ Check out the Dynamic Roadmap content ⭐

This roadmap is polymorphic, which means it's designed to work in different modes. It depends on how fast you want to go.

1. Self-Learning Course: In this mode, you are not expected to have DevOps experience, and you want to go from zero to hero, transforming your knowledge to land your first job as a DevOps Engineer.
2. Hands-on Project: In this mode, you have some experience with DevOps (usually between 1-2 years of work experience), but you want to step up your skills with real hands-on industry-grad projects to learn DevOps in a pragmatic manner.
3. Mentorship Program: In this mode, the previous two modes are covered (that means it could be only for the project or the whole roadmap) but with support from a mentor! The project will provide you with a DevOps expert who will guide you in following up on your progress and personalizing your learning plan.

The whole idea is about the Learning by Doing method (aka Problem-based Learning), which is done in iterative phases where you learn as you go and cover the whole DevOps cycle like Code, Containers, Testing, Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery, Observability, and Infrastructure.

The project is a work in progress; more details are in the status section.

I hope that the project helps more people start their DevOps engineering careers! The market is thirsty for it already!

⭐ Check out the Dynamic Roadmap content ⭐

Happy DevOps-ing :-)

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DevOps is not only a culture - Discussion Panel

Today is my second session JobStack 2023 after my previous one yesterday titled "Platform Engineering: Manage your infrastructure using Kubernetes and Crossplane", but this time it was a discussion panel with Ahmad Aabed (CTO of Zyda).

For a long time, DevOps methodologies have been the driving force behind innovation and efficiency in modern software development. You've likely encountered the popular jargon: "DevOps is not a role; it is a culture"! However, the truth is that DevOps has much more!

This session dives deep into the pillars world of DevOps, going beyond the cultural aspect to explore practices, technology stacks, mindset, and more. This is an open discussion where we will share (and encourage you to do so) the experiences of implementing DevOps. In other words, what practical steps have you taken to embrace the power of DevOps in your organization?

A shot from the recoding

At the end, I'd like to share a couple of posts I wrote before in that regard (DevOps methodologies in action):

• DevOps is not just a culture and it is also a role!: The elements of DevOps methodologies and how they could be applied differently.
• Your company doesn't need a hero but a team!: What are heroism signs in companies and how to fix that?
• J-Curve and change management: How applying DevOps needs change and project management skills.
• Let your team evolve!: Why so many people don't evolve appropriately in their career?
• The Road to Cut Production Incidents by 67% and Reduce Downtime to Zero: I used that as a particular example in the discussion.

Enjoy :-)

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Platform Engineering: Manage your infrastructure using Kubernetes and Crossplane - Presentation

Just fresh out of the kitchen, part of JobStack 2023, today I conducted a session about a great tool ... Crossplane, the open-source control plane!

I've been using Crossplane for over a year and a half, and it helped me a lot to manage my infrastructure without the need to use Terraform (I still love Terraform, but it wasn't the best for my use case).

In this session I shed the light on how Crossplane could unify infrastructure management within Kubernetes.

I gave a brief how Crossplane extends the functionality of Kubernetes and allows you to create external infrastructure. You can create Cloud resources the same way you create Kubernetes resources! I really love its declarative, cloud-native, GitOps-friendly approach to code-driven infrastructure management.

Agenda:

1. Scenario
2. What is Crossplane?
3. How it look like?
4. Crossplane Concepts
5. How Crossplane Works
6. Pros and Cons
7. Conclusion
8. Resources
9. Questions

Note: For more resources, checkout this Awesome Crossplane list.

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The slides of Platform Engineering: Manage your infrastructure using Kubernetes and Crossplane by Ahmed AbouZaid

A shot from the recoding 🙌
Watch the full session on YouTube: Platform Engineering: Manage your infrastructure using Kubernetes and Crossplane (Arabic)

Conclusion:

Crossplane is a great framework for managing infrastructure using the Kubernetes style and benefits from the that ecosystem (ArgoCD, Helm, Kustomize, etc.).

There are many use cases where it can perfectly fit in already. And at the time of writing these words (November 2023), the Marketplace has numerous enterprise and community providers configurations. Also, Composition Functions graduated to beta.

However, it's a relatively new ecosystem and still evolving, so it might not be the optimal solution for every workload. But it's probably a matter of time to grow more. So, if it's not your fit now, consider revisiting in the future.

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That's it, enjoy :-)

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