Hire Kubernetes Developers

Containers have made it possible for businesses to be much more agile, cost-effective, and reliable than ever before. As? Because containerized applications can be quickly deployed to any supporting platform (whether in-house or on a third-party cloud host) and then automatically scaled up or down. With containers, you will reduce costs and even make it possible to automate a large part of your development lifecycle.

When you start your journey with containerized applications, it will likely start with simple, single deployments of containers like Docker. Docker makes it very easy to develop and deploy an application on a single host or a cluster of Docker hosts.

But what happens when these deployments start to get more and more complicated? That's where you need the help of a container orchestrator. The most popular alternative is Kubernetes

What is Kubernetes?

Kubernetes is an open source system used to orchestrate container deployments. With this tool, you can automate the deployment, scaling, and management of all your containerized applications and services.

Kubernetes, however, is capable of much more than that. With this powerful app you can:

• Manage resource consumption.
• Manage and automate load balancing across multiple infrastructures.
• Apply resource limits to prevent deployments from consuming too many resources (which can save 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 running.

The problem is that Kubernetes is challenging. Once you get past the basics of deploying the cluster and a simple application or service, the learning curve becomes very steep. To make matters worse, Kubernetes documentation rarely keeps up with the latest version releases. This means your IT team will regularly encounter broken documentation.

What does this mean 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 can go wrong. When something fails, the problem discovered may not be well documented, meaning your developer will need to get creative to find a solution to the problem at hand.

Developers don't necessarily need to be highly skilled with Kubernetes, but they should be very familiar with adopting DevOps and SRE (Site Reliability Engineering). Anyone working with Kubernetes must be able to collaborate outside of the development department, so the ability to interact with operations is a must.

Another crucial skill for Kubernetes development is a solid understanding of the platform the container will run on. All containerized applications and services will be based on an image, and most of the time these images are Linux-based. This means your Kubernetes developers will need to know Linux.

Additionally, most Kubernetes clusters are deployed on Linux servers (often hosted by third-party cloud services). Therefore, they will also need a solid understanding of whatever cloud host you deploy to. This may vary depending on the host. The good news in this regard is that it is generally very easy to get familiar with a cloud provider.

If you plan to do 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 may include:

• Understand how resource management affects financial results.
• Ensure 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 previously, 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 on which the containers will be based.

Another crucial skill is YAML. Most container manifests are written in YAML format, which means your developers must pay close attention to indentation. A poorly indented line can prevent a container from being deployed.

Your developers should also know the container engine you will use for deployments, which could be Docker, Podman, or Crio-O. In the same vein, they will need to understand how to use Kubernetes command-line tools such as kubectl and minikube.

When it comes to languages, it's always good to have developers who understand Node.js and Python. Along with these languages, potential developers will also need to have a solid understanding of using the Git version control system. Much of Kubernetes automation will be Git-centric, 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 management of containerized applications and services.

2. What is K8s?

K8s is another term for Kubernetes.

3. What are the two 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 a data center or cloud hosting provider.

5. What is a pod?

Pods are high-level Kubernetes constructs that group one or multiple containers together and allow those containers to be deployed across the cluster.

6. What is 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 among multiple users to avoid collision.

8. What are the initial Kubernetes namespaces?

• Standard
• 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 load balancer for Kubernetes.

Job description

We're looking for an excellent, 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 to and fix bugs in upstream Kubernetes, and be comfortable working in a DevOps environment.

Responsibilities

• Develop and deploy containerized applications in an in-house data center or cloud hosting service.
• Implement and improve monitoring and alerts.
• Implement and manage CI/CD pipelines.
• Implement an autoscaling system for our Kubernetes nodes.
• Participate in on-call rotations.
• In-depth understanding and experience in at least one of the Kubernetes-based systems
• Container platforms (Openshift, EKS, GKE).
• Good understanding of Kubernetes deployments (continuous updates, scaling up and down), HPA, Node Affinity, metricServer and configmaps.
• Experience working with stateful set of application stack, Init-Containers and sidecar containers.
• Ability to leverage and customize container-based open source 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 build cloud infrastructure for ongoing and future 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 such as Terraform, Ansible and CFT.

Skills and qualifications

• Degree in Computer Science or related field.
• 5 or more years of multiplatform, multidatabase and/or multilingual experience
• 2 to 4 years of practical experience with AWS, Azure or Google Cloud Platform.
• 2 to 4 years of practical Python coding experience preferred
• 2-4 years of experience with event-driven, microservices, and serverless development patterns.
• At least 5 years of experience with Kubernetes and container runtime.
• Basic understanding of YAML, Node.js and Python.
• Understanding 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 the details.
• Understand the nature of asynchronous programming and its peculiarities and workarounds
• A positive attitude.

Conclusion

Kubernetes is challenging on every level imaginable. Because of this, you need to hire the smartest, most well-rounded developers available. These developers will need to have a very high aptitude for problem solving as well as a basic knowledge of a broad set of skills.

Zippia reports that there are approximately 5,702 SAP/ABAP developers currently employed in the United States.