2021/2022

2021 was a crazy year (that's for sure), but I had soooo much fun!! Joining the Knative OSS Team for VMware was probably one of the most rewarding moments of my career. Not only because I am able to work on an amazing Open Source community, but because I’ve been following, using, designing and promoting the project for the last 3 years. When Knative 1.0 GA was released followed by Google’s announcement about starting the process to donate the project to the CNCF I did feel the need to sum up my personal story with the project and the reasons behind my excitement.

I feel that I’ve done so many things in 2021 and professionally it has been very fulfilling. I’ve met a lot of amazing people and the older I get the more I value these connections.

I will always remember 2021 as the year where both of my KubeCon proposals were accepted and I was faced with the tough decision of dropping one (fortunately Andrea did an amazing job, as always) and not being able to make it in-person to North America, which was a new way of being heart-broken. So here is the recording of my "Tools That I Wish Existed 3 Years Ago To Build a SaaS Offering" presentation if you are interested in watching it.  We put so much love into these proposals that it is hard not to get emotional when things don’t work.

2021 was also the year where I’ve started my first author MEAP program for Manning. Writing a book for Manning is hard and a lot of work, if you add the ever-changing Kubernetes landscape to the mix it becomes quite a challenge. The "Continuous Delivery for Kubernetes" book has a developer focus and covers a bunch of Open Source projects which allowed me personally to learn more about different communities, different approaches and also to see a “Big Picture” of where things are going. I do feel more involved in the ecosystem and I do feel comfortable writing and helping people to join these communities.

I am leaving here a list of recordings of some of the events where I presented, if you wanna know more about the presentations, examples or projects feel free to reach out via twitter: @Salaboy

• DevOps Toolkit: Kubernetes for Developers AMA
• Kubernetes Community Day Guatemala 2021
• KubeCon 2021 NA - Continuous Delivery for Kubernetes Book announcement
• Cloud Native Islamabad (CNCF): Closer to Continuous Delivery with Knative - September 2021
• TFIR Linode Interview
• Jump Conference Argentina: Intro to Knative (Spanish)
• Keptn User Group Meetup: Building an Interoperable CI/CD Ecosystem
• JBCNConf 2021 (Spanish) - MultiCloud (Crossplane, Knative, Tekton, Helm)
• Kubernetes Community Day Spain 2021 - Crossplane

2022

2021 is going to be a difficult year to beat, but I’ve been saying that for the last 4 years and life keeps sending surprises my way. I do hope to be able to finish the Continuous Delivery for Kubernetes book and meet the amazing Kubernetes community and friends at KubeCon Valencia in May. I will be looking forward to joining more initiatives in the Continuous Delivery Foundation and I want to make sure that more complex examples showing people how to use different Open Source projects around CD are shared and evolved by the community.

I will continue with my Knative OSS Diaries entries, as I am expecting loads of exciting news around Knative in 2022. I do see Knative `func` growing a lot and expanding its features to enable developers to go faster.  I really want to see `func` and the CD Events SIG getting closer by adopting standard events for externalizing events such as cloning, building, deploying and upgrading functions. There is a lot of work to be done in this space, but with the current community involvement, I hope that 2022 is the year where the project can graduate out of the sandbox to become one of the Knative project main pillars.

I should push for doing more Twitter Spaces with my personal friend and influencer Salman Iqbal around new projects and initiatives around Kubernetes. We have learnt so much by looking at new projects, how they evolve and how they are being designed.

On my TODO list, there are some key initiatives that I would love to spend some time on:

• I want to expand my From Monolith to Kubernetes examples to include Keptn, Cartographer and Kratix, as I see more and more the discussion about Supply Chain becoming relevant for medium to large projects. I will definitely continue my "Platforms on top of Kubernetes" exploration with Crossplane and tools like Carvel. In 2022, I really hope to have time and the right funding to make these examples a multi-cloud experience and I hope to be able to add and document a clear automation strategy on major cloud providers. I also want to make sure that these examples are easier to access and to contribute, and for this I am currently evaluating donating them to a neutral place where more people can collaborate to improve and maintain these examples.
• Build or collaborate in building a Carvel Crossplane Provider and some kind of decoration mechanism for Crossplane, so we can quickly decorate Kubernetes resources, such as Kubernetes Clusters with Cluster-level Operators. The main objective here is to be able to create Kubernetes Cluster with tools like Knative, Tekton, Ketpn, etc. installed. This is not something easy to achieve nowadays.
• Knative higher-level abstractions and features: there are several things being discussed in community channels about streaming use cases, I am personally interested in event-driven state machines and more higher level features such as feature flags and progressive delivery using Knative Serving and Eventing base constructs. There are tons of Cloud Native and Continuous Delivery patterns that can be implemented on top of Knative that I believe that as a community we can build some opinionated tools like func that not only simplify and abstract the inherent complexity of Kubernetes from developers but also provides a rich developer experience by integrating different OSS projects together. I am hoping to see a closer integration between Knative and Spring Cloud + Spring Cloud Functions + Spring Native which allows us to create more advanced examples.
• CD Events from CD Foundation: I really want to see how CD Events can be adopted by more projects, so the event definitions mature and facilitate integrations between different projects and initiatives. By having more concrete Events, with well defined types and payloads can help a lot in an interoperability scenario with tools that all follow the same conventions. I do wanna see tools, built in different languages working together to deliver software in a more efficient way. To make this happen, we all need to collaborate and build some components. I can do my fair share by adding CD Events into Knative Serving and Eventing and probably func. I do expect some integration with Crossplane as well. I am all in for collaborations in this space.
• Meetups, Trips and meeeting people: I have learnt so much in 2021 that I am hoping to be able to go to meetups, conferences and talk to people to keep learning and sharing my lessons-learned.

I’ve already scheduled at least 10 talks, podcasts and webinars that I am really looking forward to starting preparing. I will be adding links and probably tweeting about these events when they get a concrete date.

Next week, I will be back full-time to work after a few weeks of holidays, so I will be catching up and probably writing a new edition of my Knative OSS Diaries with my findings.

If you want to join me in this OSS journey, help and collaborate on some of these projects, or if you are interested in joining the Knative OSS team for VMware, get in touch so we can see how to work together as part of these amazing communities.