Note: This site is under active development, please excuse any errors or omissions
The PKS Ninja Community on Github provides free learning resources for cloud native technologies. To learn more about the community, please read the Community Intro and the Approach and Learning Philosophy sections below
For instructions to get started with accessing courses and learning materials on the site, check out the Community Getting Started Guide
All content on this site is subject to the Apache 2.0 license as detailed here
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 continuously updates and advanced learning assets that keep pace with rapidly changing technologies, and this is the central focus of the PKS Ninja community
Practical, hands on experience and regular practice is key to becoming an effective practitioner in cloud native technologies. The Ninja learning model focuses on 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
Agile, CI/CD and the rapidly increasing cadence of feature delivery creates new requirements and challenges for technology workers that need to support cloud native platforms and applications
While it is common knowledge that application developers need extensive tools and support ecosystems to be able to deliver software at an agile cadence, to successfully implement agile development and operations, it is critical to have an education and enablement methodology that can keep pace. Whether your role is in operations, development or even a LOB technical role, we are all in positions where our organizations require us to be technical specialists and when new features are out and there is no training or effective knowledge sharing, the entire initiative suffers
The PKS-Ninja community provides an innovative model that provides unique methods to help participants quickly gain comfort and familiarity with devops and cloud native tools and best practices. The community and this lab guide is a markdown file in a git repository, a living software project that participants interact with as a core part of the learning experience
The courses and lab guides provided center around a common set of topologies, participants learn while building and configuring their own lab environment. Each community participant then has access to a common lab environment, where community members can easily share their knowledge and practices with each other in a way that all members of the community can easily replicate
The community also provides a model and platform for online courseware delivery, with the key goal of making providing simple processes to make it easier to build, share and absorb expert content. All participants in the community are encouraged to add lab guides or host their courses on the PKS-Ninja repository, where we plan to deliver a diverse learning catalog of cloud native learning and enablement assets based in practical hands on learning
To get started with the community, please check out the Community Getting Started Guide
Thank you for your interest and participation in the PKS Ninja community!