What did our lead Linux Kubernetes container engineer think of 2022?

What did our lead Linux Kubernetes container engineer think of 2022?

Now that 2022 is over, we at Fairbanks and 42on like to reminisce a little on the past year. To do this from multiple perspectives we have interviewed some of our colleagues for you. 

In the last two blogs you can read about the 2022 experiences of Eric Kessels (Fairbanks) and Wout van Heeswijk (42on). In this blog you can read the interview we held with Sven Osenga, our lead Linux Kubernetes container engineer. You will read about his thoughts in regards of the best container moments of this year, what developments he would like to see in the next year and more.

What did you find the most remarkable within the field of containers, in 2022? 
For me, the most pleasant thing about this year is the specific development where you can include the network configuration for OpenShift IPI installations into your install-config. For instance, before this development you would have to manually adjust and set the network configurations in the image used for installing, where now it has become 5 lines in a configuration file. This makes my life in automating container landscapes much easier.

What has been the best container development to you, this year? 
To me all decisions and choices that have been made around container platforms are very positive. The adoption of these technologies is going very fast and you can see that the community listens carefully to the users. I think this shows that the products are mature.

What did you find a specific challenge for containers? 
What comes to mind first is writing and managing Ansible code for fully automatic cluster deployment. The code changes very quickly because Kubernetes also changes quickly. What works now may not work in 3 months; this remains a challenge. Fairbanks has now started to apply ‘versioning’ to our Ansible code to make sure that scripts work and continue to work in new versions of Kubernetes, OKD or OpenShift.

Apart from containers, what was your most positive experience in 2022? 
Particularly that my colleagues are nice people to work with. I feel like we work really closely together, and all have the same goal. For me, the culture at a company is very important. You are who you are, and you don’t have to constantly explain or prove yourself. You can be yourself and the technique comes first. Normally personalities can clash I did not have this experience at all. Working together goes super smooth.

What developments would you like to see for containers next year? 
The ecosystem is so huge and adoption is going so fast, this is difficult to say. But if I have to mention one thing I would like to see: A development on Red Hat OpenShift’s image mirroring system, because it isn’t exactly super smooth. The reason it isn’t super smooth is because of the specific working method of one of our container customers. The result is that we have to ‘’babysit’’ it, which can easily take up a day and a half. So, if I have to put something on my wish list, I choose this one. Fortunately, you only have to do this once in a couple of months. Nevertheless, I would like to automate it, but that it is not possible at the moment.

What did you think of the interview? Do you recognize the mentioned aspects yourself? Let us know in the comment section.

Would you like to read what our Ceph lead engineer thinks of 2022? You can do so through the following link: https://www.42on.com/interview-lead-ceph-engineer/

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