Closing the Kubernetes Skills Gap with Developer-First Learning

How do you begin learning Kubernetes? This is an important question for any organization building, hosting, or managing applications today. For DigitalOcean, which released its managed Kubernetes product in 2018, it's essential.

The demand for developers with experience building and deploying containerized apps and services continues to grow rapidly. According to Dice, Kubernetes proficiency was the most listed job requirement in their job posting database in 2018 – by far. However, when DigitalOcean surveyed container usage trends among developers for our Currents research report last year, we found that only 42% of developers working with containers were using Kubernetes.

DigitalOcean's core philosophy has always been to make the developer experience simple and intuitive – and this applies to how we support developers using Kubernetes. This philosophy underpins our longstanding commitment to education through our Community platform and technical tutorials. When the internal announcement of our managed Kubernetes service went out, the mission for our Developer Education team was clear: Teach the world Kubernetes! This would support not only DigitalOcean customers, but also the internal teams that worked with these users – as well as anyone who was interested in Kubernetes more broadly.

Thanks to advances in technologies like containers and Kubernetes, there is a paradigm shift going on in modern software development to move to containers and microservices. As many developers come face-to-face with this shift, it is crucial that they have quality content, thorough instructions, and a supportive community to guide them. Our DigitalOcean community is a great place for anyone looking for help or a collaborative environment with which to share information and experiences.

– John Kwiatkoski, Senior Developer Support Engineer - Kubernetes at DigitalOcean

The team set out to write code and tutorials that would walk readers through core concepts and specific tasks related to running applications on Kubernetes. As the body of content grew, so did a pattern: The tutorials followed the steps that any new user would take in learning about and eventually using Kubernetes to run their applications.

These steps included:

1. Learning Kubernetes core concepts
2. Modernizing applications to work with containers
3. Containerizing applications
4. Deploying applications to Kubernetes
5. Managing cluster operations

The team began to consider how this structure could benefit users if it were presented as a defined curriculum. We continued iterating on it, integrating feedback from users as well as our own experience – and today we are happy to introduce DigitalOcean’s Kubernetes for Full-Stack Developers, a self-guided course designed to take you from start to finish in the process of learning Kubernetes.

This self-guided learning approach is designed to help both newcomers and experienced users learn more about Kubernetes container clusters and running containerized applications on them. With core Kubernetes concepts in hand, running an application on a production cluster can become a familiar, repeatable, and automated process.

Next up: learning about more advanced Kubernetes topics – like how to manage and monitor a production Kubernetes cluster.

Ready to get started with Kubernetes? Sign up now for the course!

We hope you enjoy taking your learning journey with DigitalOcean, and look forward to hearing your feedback.