Developing a Perfect Cloud Foundry Engineer
Andrei Yurkevich, CTO at Altoros, gave a lightning talk on the second day of the Cloud Foundry Summit Europe 2016 in Frankfurt. He focused on the traits and characteristics needed for a perfect Cloud Foundry engineer.
A perfect Cloud Foundry deployment
Before talking about a perfect Cloud Engineer, Andrei first covered a perfect Cloud Foundry deployment. He compared it to moving into a new house only to find out that “the water is leaking, the garage is too narrow for your car, and there is some terrible smell in the bathroom.”
The situation is similar to when developers move to a “shiny new cloud-native platform and they have issues with logging. They don’t have proper services configured for them. They don’t have CI/CD pipelines set up.”
According to Andrei, this is an issue wherein there are insufficient preparations for surviving a disaster. “Companies rely solely on BOSH to solve all their problems. They don’t do proper testing,” said Andrei.
“BOSH is not a technology that covers you from everything.” —Andrei Yurkevich, CTO, Altoros
This lack of preparation and education leads to developers simply stopping from using the platform or worse, “continue doing the things the way they used to do with their old infrastructure.”
“Often, we see engineers deploy their applications to cloud-native platforms, but they do this in their old way.” —Andrei Yurkevich, CTO, Altoros
What skills and traits are needed?
Andrei focused on the activities Cloud Foundry engineers need to perform. These are (not being exhaustive, of course):
- Deployment
- Maintenance
- Educate users
- Monitor the platform
- Build high-level infrastructure
- Ensure proper security
- Write deployment manifests
- Develop BOSH releases
To successfully deal with these tasks, ideal Cloud Foundry engineers would be expected to have knowledge and experience in the following areas:
- IaaS
- CI/CD
- 12-factor apps
- Versioning, source code repo
- Disaster recovery
- High availability
- Networking
- Performance tuning
- Virtualization and containerization
“They need to understand the difference between a virtual machine and a container. Some candidates just don’t understand it.” —Andrei Yurkevich, CTO, Altoros
Just as important as the technical skills are the soft skills:
- Verbal and written communication
- Understanding Agile methodologies
- Understanding SLDC
- Coaching and mentoring
- Team player
- Self-education
- Curiosity
- Pro-activity
- Problem solving
“Cloud Foundry engineers need to have soft skills.” —Andrei Yurkevich, CTO, Altoros
Aside from the technical and soft skills, there are a few more traits that help to make a perfect candidate:
- Having the correct mindset
- Having an ability to see the big picture
- Understanding of the constraints and specifics of the company
- Helping drive the cultural change in the company
- Being realistic
Anything else?
Once all the necessary skills and traits are there, knowledge of Cloud Foundry components is needed:
- BOSH
- Diego
- NATS
- Router
- Loggregator
- Cloud Controller
- CLI
- Buildpacks
- Service brokers
- UAA
- etcd
The next part is knowing about the Cloud Foundry operations:
- Logging
- Monitoring
- Services
- CI/CD tools
- Secret management
Finally, there’s knowing how to configure everything:
- Backup/Restore/Disaster recovery
- High availability
- Security
- Risk management
- Auditing
“We’re getting a univeral soldier—a man with many, many hats.” —Andrei Yurkevich, CTO, Altoros
Education is needed all the time
At the end of the day, engaging a universal soldier is a tough task. A diverse team of specialists may also be an option, but the knowledge, skills, and traits gained are key to developing perfect Cloud Foundry engineers anyway.
“It’s up to you to decide. Do you want universal soldiers or a team of specialists?”
—Andrei Yurkevich, CTO, Altoros
In both cases, education is an ever-lasting process. Therefore, at the end of his presentation, Andrei introduced the audience to an online Cloud Foundry training platform developed by Altoros. It’s a cloud environment where companies starting digital transformation can play with Cloud Foundry deployments and learn cloud-native development first-hand.
Andrei urged potential candidates to sign up for free—while the platform is in beta—and provide feedback. The training platform is expected to go into production by the end of October, 2016.
Related slides
Other CF Summit recaps:
- Cloud Foundry Summit Europe 2016 Begins with Special Interest Groups
- Community and Ecosystem at Cloud Foundry Summit Europe (Day 1)
- Cloud Foundry Summit Europe Focuses on Multi-Cloud and IoT (Day 2)
- Top 100 Quotes from the Cloud Foundry Summit Europe 2016
About the speaker
