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From the 21st of June till the 23rd of June the Devopsdays Amsterdam were held in Pakhuis de Zwijger in Amsterdam. There is a first time for everything and for me this I attended the Devopsdays in three roles: Attendee, for me this was the third time I attended the Devopsdays in Pakhuis de Zwijger. (Gold) Sponsor, Luminis was one of the gold sponsors. In 2019 the company I worked for at that moment was also a gold sponsor. Speaker, this was the first time for me to speak at Devopsdays. Devopdays starts with a workshop day and after that two days of sessions. Next to that there is a lot of stuff going on what makes my Devopsdays in my opinion an conference everyone should attend. I will give a recap of some of sessions that I thought were interesting and also some focus on my different roles during the conference. ...

Introduction This year KubeCon / CloudNativeCon Europe was held in the Netherlands at the RAI conference center in Amsterdam. KubeCon started with the different sponsor hosted and CNCF hosted colocated events like ArgoCon, CiliumCon, Observability day and Azure Day with Kubernetes. Very cool that it was hosted in the Netherlands, felt as home game. In this post I want to give a recap of the Azure Day with Kubernetes and KubeCon with some of the highlights, announcements and interesting sessions that I have attended. Videos of all the colocated events are or will become available in the next days. Watch this channel for the all the talks of KubeCon and other events like KCD. ...

Introduction Recently Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) Edge Essentials became general available. AKS Edge Essentials is the latest addition to the AKS portfolio which already consist of Azure Kubernetes Services and AKS hybrid cluster. The product was originally announced at Ignite 2022 as AKS light. With AKS Edge, Microsoft makes it possible to run AKS on local Windows machines or Edge devices running the Windows operating system. AKS Edge Essentials includes the following features, managed by Microsoft: ...

On the 23rd and 24th of February the Kubernetes Community Days (KCD) were organised by the Dutch Kubernetes meetup group backup by the CNCF. The first KCD of its kind was organised in 2019 in the Netherlands. Nowadays it is an CNCF supported event organised by the local community in a country. There are KCD events everywhere in the world. A successful KCD event consists of keynotes, workshops and presentations round the topic Kubernetes. It is not only talks. Important part is also the social component which focuses on the community. For instance a a rather large group of the attendees went after the event to a karaoke bar.This year at the of the conference was a vegan barbecue followed by a dance party which was free for all attendees and after 23:00 everybody was welcome. The location was the ‘party-location’ Westerunie. ...

Short update: I’m happy to announce that I have been admitted to the Calico Big Cats Ambassador program. Thanks to Tigera, Chris Tomkins and Project Calico. In the last months I have been busy with gettting my Calico certifications. At the moment I have the Calico Certified Operator:Level 1 and Calico Certified Operator: AWS Expert. I’m still pursuing the Calico Certified Operator: eBPF. My plan is to finish this training in the coming week or next week. ...

I started 2021 with a focus on Microsoft Azure and also passed two exams which I also mention in earlier posts. In August I changed jobs. At my current employer there is more a focus on AWS as a cloud provider. Unfortunately my AWS certification had expired, so I had to start over again. My goal for 2021 was to pass at least the Solutions Architect Associate exam. I achieved that goal and also passed to other exams. ...

Last year I passed my az-104 certification and at that moment I thought I would first focus on achieving az-400. At the beginning of this year I decided that it was smarter to first pass the Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect Expert certification. Reason for that was that I already took the class last year for az-303 which is on of the two exams that you have to pass. So in the beginning of March of this year I passed my az-303 exam and at the end of March I also passed my az-304 exam. View my AZ-303 credential on Credly. ...

Today I passed my first Azure exam for this year, Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator Associate. My goal is to achieve two other certificates in the coming two months, Microsoft Certified: DevOps Engineer Expert and Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect Expert. For the first certification this is one of the required exams. Next will be AZ-400 Designing and Implementing Microsoft DevOps Solutions In preparation for this exam I read the blueprint and the modules offered on Microsoft Learn. Also I used AZ-104 Microsoft Azure Administrator Exam Certification 2020 by Scott Duffy on Udemy.com and I also followed AZ-303: Microsoft Azure Architect Technologies training which was offered by my company and has some overlap with AZ-104 topic wise. Next to that I used a free account on Azure to get hands on experience with Azure. The exam itself is not difficult and consist only of 65 multiple choice questions. I had some questions where I was not allowed to go back to the earlier question and didn’t show up in the question review screen. The last four questions where around a case study. All in all a very doable exam if you have some hands on experience and of course make sure that you read the questions! View my Azure Administrator Associate credential on Credly.

This is the first day of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe Virtual. Originally this event was planned for the end of March/ beginning of April in Amsterdam. I was really looking forward to it because Amsterdam is very near where I live. Because of covid-19 is wast decided to postpone the event and finally they made it a virtual event. Despite of the fact that it is now a virtual event I’m still happy that Kubecon + CloudNativeCon is being held. I think the CNCF, sponsors, speakers and everybody that is involved with creating this event deserve kudos for organising it. I’m ready to attend the sessions, visit the virtual booth’s and participate in this event. I will not be able to fully focus this whole week on KubeCon so I making choices in which sessions I will follow. During the conference I will share topics that interest me. ...

Last week I completed Certified Rancher Operator: Level 1. I already had some experience with the products of Rancher Labs. I wrote some posts about the K3S product and I have implemented a Rancher based solution at a customer. Next to that I was part of team tht build a Rancher based platform to host different teams in a muli tenant setup. I already heard that Rancher was thinking about certifications for their products. I have to say that I like their approach. It is very easy to start. You have to go the Rancher Academy and create a account. Currently there is one training available but during the training there are references being made to the next training and at the end of the course they talk about some of the topics the level 2 training will contain. The training is a mix of presentations and demo’s, via Youtube videos, and excercises you can do. The excercises are not mandetory but will help you understand the material better. The trainers Adrian Goins and William Jimenez are doing a good job in presenting the material. It easy to follow and complete because the videos are split up in small chunks so that you are able to complete parts of the training without having to block large parts of your day. After you have completed the training and passed the final test you get a certificate. You can see my certificate here ...