2 days ago (20.02.2025), it was a pleasure to participate in the Open
Source Summit 2025 in KSA.
My session was about participating in Open-source and how it helps to
be a better DevOps engineer. In fact, the best DevOps engineers I have
encountered possess T-shaped
skills that require diving into many areas, even outside of the
daily work topics.
How Open Source Helped Me Step Up My DevOps Career
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):
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.
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.
At the end of last year (2021), and after a couple of years of
Kubernetes production hands-on, I found that it was time to dive more
into Kubernetes security, and after a lot of reading and practising, I
got my CKS certificate. Also, for the last 3 quarters, security was one
of the focus areas in my team, and I was taking care of it.
For that reason, I decided to consolidate that into a session which
is a combination of Kubernetes Security Best Practices and tips for the
Certified Kubernetes Security Specialist (CKS) exam to share the
knowledge in my team as well across teams.
The session is just 15 Min in total. The first 6 Min are for everyone
and the rest for Kubernetes specialists or anyone who wants to dive more
into Kubernetes security topics. If you are just interested in the
tools, then jump to section #5 Kubernetes Security Starter
Kit. If you are just interested in the CKS exam tips, then jump
to section #6 CKS Exam Overview and Tips.
The recording of Kubernetes Security Best Practices session
Overview:
A dive into Kubernetes Security Best Practices and tips for the
Certified Kubernetes Security Specialist (CKS) exam.
The 1-3 sections are for everyone and will cover the container era's
security. So it doesn't matter your title or background; they are a good
start for anyone.
The 4-6 sections will dive more into Kubernetes security, so DevOps
engineers and SREs will probably find that more interesting. But in
general, anyone interested in Kubernetes security is more than
welcome.
Last Satruday (18.06.2022), I had a great chance to moderate and participate the DevOps circle in JobStack 2022 by Talents Arena. JobStack is the biggest virtual tech job fair in the region (MENA) and this was the 4rd edition.
With Hussein El-Sayed (Software engineer III at AWS) and Mohamed Radwan (Sr. Cloud Architect at T-Systems) ... we answered many different questions about DevOps.
The circle or the AMA session was heavily based on a previous collaborative session between us in 2022 (DevOps! What, Why, and How? - Arabic)
The whole event was great and had a lot of fruitful sessions and discussions.
Well, this is the 3rd post in the same month, I didn't do that for a long time! But Q3 2021 has been super productive and many things have been done.
Yesterday, as part of the knowledge share and developer enablement at Camunda, I delivered a Docker Best Practices Workshop which was available for the whole engineering division at Camunda.
What I really liked about this workshop, that everyone told me that they learned something new, even though they have been working with Docker for a pretty long time!
Last Saturday (28.08.2021), I had a great chance to participate in JobStack 2021 by Talents Arena. JobStack is the Biggest virtual tech job fair in the region (MENA) and this was the 3rd edition.
2 weeks ago, as a DevOps engineer and part of the knowledge share and developer enablement at Camunda, I made across teams TechTalk about Kubernetes requests and limits, aka how to manage containers resources in Kubernetes.
Well, usually I post my talk presentation when it's done. But due to the current situation with Coronavirus all meetups have been canceled (the talk is meant to be held in
Last week, I had a nice session where I talked about how participating in Open-source made me a better DevOps.
Which actually started not just as a professional system engineer, but
Last week in CrossEngage Academy we had another session. This time it was by me, about my favorite stack so far (after using it for 2 years it's still!), InfluxDB and TICK Stack!
Hello, my name is Ahmed AbouZaid, I'm a passionate Tech Lead DevOps Engineer. 👋
I specialize in Cloud-Native and Kubernetes. I'm also a Free/Open source geek and book author. My favorite topics are DevOps transformation, DevSecOps, automation, data, and metrics.
