Containers have made it possible for businesses to be far more agile, cost-effective, and reliable than ever before. How? Because containerized applications can be quickly deployed on any supporting platform (be it in-house or a third-party cloud host) and then automatically scaled up or down. With containers, you’ll cut costs and make it possible to even automate a large portion of your development lifecycle.
When you first start your journey with containerized applications, it will probably start with simple, single container deployments from the likes of Docker. Docker makes it very easy to develop and roll out an application to either a single host or a cluster of Docker hosts.
But what happens when those deployments start to get more and more complicated? That’s when you need the help of a container orchestrator. The single most popular alternative is Kubernetes
What is Kubernetes?
Kubernetes is an open-source system used for the orchestration of container deployments. With this tool, you can automate the deployment, scaling, and management of all your containerized apps and services.
Kubernetes, though, is capable of far more than that. With this powerful application, you can:
- Manage resource consumption.
- Manage and automate load balancing across numerous infrastructures.
- Apply resource limits to prevent deployments from consuming too many resources (which can save you money).
- Move containers or pods from one host to another.
- Perform canary deployments and rollbacks.
Kubernetes can help you be more agile, save money, deploy to any cloud host, and keep your business applications humming.
Thing is, Kubernetes is challenging. Once you get beyond the basics of deploying the cluster and a simple application or service, the learning curve gets very steep. To make matters worse, the Kubernetes documentation rarely keeps up with the latest version releases. That means your IT staff will regularly run into documentation that’s broken.
What does that mean for when you need to hire Kubernetes developers?
What to Look For in a Kubernetes Developer?
One of the most important skills a Kubernetes developer must have is the ability to troubleshoot because things will go wrong. When something does break, the discovered issue might not be well documented, which means your developer will need to be creative in finding a solution for the problem at hand.
Developers don’t necessarily need to be highly skilled with Kubernetes, but they absolutely must be very familiar with DevOps and SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) adoption. Anyone who works with Kubernetes must be able to collaborate outside of the developer department, so the ability to interact with operations is a must.
Another very crucial skill for Kubernetes development is a solid understanding of the platform the container will run on. All containerized apps and services will be based on an image and most often those images are Linux based. That means your Kubernetes developers will need to know Linux.
Additionally, most Kubernetes clusters are deployed on Linux servers (most often hosted by third-party cloud services). So they’ll also need a solid grasp on whatever cloud host you deploy to. That could vary, depending on the host. The good news on that front is getting up to speed with a cloud provider is generally pretty easy.
If you plan on doing serious automation, your developers will need to be well versed in CI/CE and tools like Helm, Draft, Jenkins X, CircleCI, Travis, GitLab, and Weave Cloud.
Other, less tangible skill sets might include:
- Understanding how resource management affects the bottom line.
- Ensuring deployments are observable.
- Working with incident response tools.
- The ability to establish and work with feedback loops.
But what about the hard skills you need? There are many. As mentioned earlier, your developers will need to know Linux. More than that, they need to know how to work with the Linux command line, so they can more easily work with the images the containers will be based on.
Another skill that is crucial is YAML. Most container manifests are written in the YAML format, which means your developers must pay close attention to indention. One poorly indented line can prevent a container from deploying.
Your developers must also know the container engine you’ll be using for deployments, which could be Docker, Podman, or Crio-O. Along those same lines, they’ll need to understand how to use the Kubernetes command-line tools, such as kubectl and minikube.
As far as languages are concerned, it’s always good to have developers who understand Node.js and Python. Along with those languages, prospective developers will also need to have a solid grasp of using the Git version control system. Much of your Kubernetes automation will center around Git, so this will eventually become an absolute necessity.
Interview Questions
1. What is Kubernetes?
Kubernetes is the most widely-adopted container orchestration platform on the market, that allows you to automate the deployment, scaling, and managing of containerized applications and services.
2. What is K8s?
K8s is another term for Kubernetes.
3. What are the 2 main architectural components of Kubernetes?
The master node and the worker node.
4. What is a Kubernetes node?
A node is the smallest unit of computing hardware in a Kubernetes cluster. A node can be a physical or virtual machine in either a data center or a cloud hosting provider.
5. What is a pod?
Pods are high-level Kubernetes constructs that wrap single or multiple containers and allow those containers to be deployed to the cluster.
6. What is the kube-scheduler?
The kube-scheduler is responsible for assigning nodes to newly created pods.
7. What is a Kubernetes namespace?
A namespace is a way to divide cluster resources between multiple users to avoid collision.
8. What are the initial Kubernetes namespaces?
- Default
- Kube – system
- Kube – public
9. What is etcd?
Etcd is where Kubernetes data is stored in key-value pairs.
10. What is Kube-proxy?
Kube-proxy is the Kubernetes load balancer.
Job Description
We’re looking for an outstanding, self-motivated developer to help design and deploy applications and services to a Kubernetes cluster. The ideal candidate will work closely with our customers, understand and capture their requirements, design and build distributed systems, contribute and fix bugs in upstream Kubernetes, and be comfortable working in a DevOps environment.
Responsibilities
- Develop and deploy containerized applications to either an in-house data center or cloud-hosting service.
- Implement and improve monitoring and alerting.
- Implement and manage CI/CD pipelines.
- Implement an auto-scaling system for our Kubernetes nodes.
- Participate in on-call rotations.
- In-depth understanding and experience in at least one of the Kubernetes-based
- Container Platforms (Openshift, EKS, GKE).
- Good understanding of Kubernetes Deployments (Rolling updates, scale-up, scale-down), HPA, Node Affinity, metricServer, and configmaps.
- Working experience with application Stack stateful set, Init-Containers, and sidecar containers.
- Ability to leverage and customize open-source, container-based application runtimes to meet our requirements and policies.
- Ability to create Kubernetes operators for custom requirements.
- Ability to create custom scripts for different automation needs for container platforms.
- Create and/or help teams to build Cloud infrastructure for ongoing and upcoming projects adhering to Infrastructure-as-Code principles.
- Employ CI/CD and DevOps best practices.
- Production experience in large environments using automation and configuration management tools like Terraform, Ansible, and CFT.
Skills and Qualifications
- Degree in Computer Science or related field.
- 5 or more years multi-platform, multi-database, and/or multi-language experience
- 2-4 years of hands-on experience with AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud Platform.
- 2-4 years hands-on experience in python coding experience preferred
- 2-4 years of experience with Event-driven, Micro-services, and Serverless development patterns.
- At least 5 years experience with Kubernetes and a container runtime.
- Basic understanding of YAML, Node.js, and Python.
- Understanding of the principles behind scalable applications.
- Fundamental understanding of version control systems (such as Git).
- Solid problem-solving skills.
- Excellent written and verbal communication.
- Good organizational skills.
- Ability to work as part of a team.
- Attention to detail.
- Understanding the nature of asynchronous programming and its quirks and workarounds
- A positive attitude.
Conclusion
Kubernetes is challenging on every conceivable level. Because of that, you need to hire the sharpest, most well-rounded developers available. Those developers will need to have a very high aptitude for troubleshooting, as well as a basic knowledge of a broad skill set.
Zippia reports that there are approximately 5,702 SAP/ABAP developers currently employed in the United States.
