This site is under active development, please excuse any errors or omissions
The PKS Ninja program is dedicated to building a community of students and practitioners of Cloud Native Technologies. The community seeks to provide practical educational experiences that help enrich and maximize the knowledge sharing potential for community participants and contributors
This site also hosts the lab guides used in the VMware internal/invite-only PKS Ninja course, however anyone can access the materials provided on this site. Both PKS Ninja students and the broader community need access to continuing education, which is a key focus of the PKS Ninja Community
Practical, hands on experience and regular practice is key to becoming an effective practitioner in cloud native technologies. A central focus of the community is hands on eductation, centered around real world workflows, tools and processes, and made real through actual contribution in open & open source community projects
While the community does have an overall focus on VMware PKS, all are welcome as learning materials on this site cross a broad range of related topics with a strong focus on open source, devops, and all things cloud native
VMware Employees - Expand this section for employee-specific details
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## VMware Employees - Expand this section for employee-specific details
A central ideology behind this community is that CI/CD fundamentally breaks the traditional educational model. For most in the community the rapid pace of feature velocity delivered in PKS and related cloud native technologies is new and is clearly a challenge to deal with, especially as new cloud native methodologies are applied to an increasing array of enterprise-specific needs and applications
As the pace of software development continues to accelerate, it is well understood that to support these demands developers need new tools and processes such as Agile methodologies and continuous integration and continuous delivery tools and support systems.
What is often less emphasized is the needs of the community that provides operational support for all these new rapidly developed features. In order to support faster developement cycles and aspire to full continuous integration and deployment, support staff must have operational support systems and educational and practice knowledge that evolves with the pace of software
The only way for this model to work, is if operational support systems, processes, training and other impacted functions also adopt Agile and CI/CD methodologies
This community seeks to apply rapid development methodologies to educational tools and materials provided. This factor provides a unique educational opportunity as The best way to learn about rapid development and CI/CD is to practice, and as the community and all content within is managed with these principles, it provides a unique opportunity to participate in real-world rapid development practices from the beginning of a members participation in the community
Early in the core cirriculum students learn to fork the PKS-Ninja repo, create a subdirectory for themselves in the /Students directory, and create a pull request to merge their update back into the core PKS-Ninja repo. Throughout the materials students are encouraged to save and commit their own exercises and updates back to the PKS-Ninja repo to get comforatable with this new and important regular practice for cloud native practitioners
This is the exact process used by communities across github to contribute to open projects, lab guide contributors are encouraged to focus on exercises and challenges that require contribution and participation both in this and other open communities
Member participation is the ultimate goal of this community. To keep pace with the demands of the increasingly rapid growth of the technologies we support, we truly need a community effort. All participants of this community are strongly encouraged to participate, and that can be as simple as providing some feedback about the materials when you go through them, sharing word of mouth with your peers about the community, resolving issues or adding improvements, or even contributing entirely new lab guides. Every contribution adds significant value to the participants github and community profile
Please see the Contributors Guide to learn more!
This site includes the lab guides for VMware's internal invitation-only PKS Ninja Course offering. If you are a student in a live VMware class welcome! The course instructor will provide directions in alignment with your class schedule.
This community is not exclusive to class students, and we want any and we hop can provide a valued educational resource regardless of whether you are a Ninja class student, vmware or partnern employee