Chapter 8. Contributor Experience
By this point in the book, hopefully we have convinced you that Kubernetes is a popular and exciting technology that will bring substantial value to your enterprise. But, if you really want excitement, we highly recommend that you become a contributor to the Kubernetes community. The Kubernetes contributor community is an amazing group of very friendly people with a tremendous amount of collective knowledge about cloud computing and container technologies. By becoming a contributor, you will have the opportunity to expand your skills and strengthen your professional network. Contributing to Kubernetes can take several forms, including contributing to source code, opening bug reports, and contributing to documentation.
Learning how to contribute to an open source project like Kubernetes can be quite intimidating if you have never contributed to an open source project in the past. Fortunately, there are several resources available to help accelerate your journey to being a contributor to the Kubernetes community. In this chapter, we highlight several of these excellent online resources.
Kubernetes Website
The primary Kubernetes website is an excellent place to begin looking for information on Kubernetes. As shown in Figure 8-1, the home page for Kubernetes provides links for more information on topics such as documentation, community, blogs, and case studies. In the community section of the Kubernetes website, you will find more information on how to join the large number of Kubernetes Special Interests Groups (SIGs). Each SIG focuses on a specific aspect of Kubernetes, and hopefully you can find a group that excites you and matches your interests.
Figure 8-1. Kubernetes website home page.
The Cloud Native Computing Foundation Website
Figure 8-2 shows the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) website. It provides a large amount of information on a variety of cloud-native computing projects that are hosted by the CNCF. The projects under the umbrella of the CNCF include Kubernetes, Prometheus, Envoy, Containerd, Fluentd, Helm, and several others. In addition, the CNCF provides several Kubernetes educational training modules and also has a Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD) Program.
Figure 8-2. Cloud Native Computing Foundation website home page.
IBM Developer Website
The IBM Developer Website provides a large number of Kubernetes-based code patterns. This website semantically links code, content, and community to empower developers and provide them with support as they learn new open source technologies. At IBM Developer, developers can take guided learning paths through a variety of open source topics and solutions to progress their technical depth and expand their personal eminence in open source. A large portion of the IBM Developer Website is focused on Kubernetes code samples and tutorials, as well as its use by adjacent technologies. Figure 8-3 depicts the Kubernetes portion of the IBM Developer Website.
Figure 8-3. IBM Developer Website Kubernetes code patterns page.
Kubernetes Contributor Experience SIG
The Kubernetes community takes the happiness of its contributors very seriously. In fact, they have an entire SIG, the Contributor Experience SIG, dedicated to improving the contributor experience. The Contributor Experience SIG is an amazing group of folks who want to know more about you and understand the issues you might be encountering as you become a Kubernetes contributor. The Contributor Experience SIG website, shown in Figure 8-4, is located on Kubernetes community GitHub. Take some time to visit this website for more information on how to contact the Contributor Experience SIG and learn more about the contributor topics it focuses on.
Kubernetes Documentation SIG
If you don’t feel comfortable contributing to Kubernetes source code but still have a strong desire to participate in the Kubernetes community as a contributor, the Kubernetes Documentation SIG may be the perfect fit for you. The Kubernetes Documentation SIG maintains the Kubernetes documentation repository. Figure 8-5 presents a snapshot of the home page for this SIG. The GitHub pull request process this team utilizes to accept contributions is essentially the same process used by Kubernetes code repositories. Because of this, the skills you acquire learning how to be a documentation contributor will also help you even if your long-term goal is to be a Kubernetes code contributor. In addition, the Kubernetes Documentation SIG will typically run Documentation Sprints at all the KubeCon/CloudNativeCon conferences. At these sprints, you get hands-on training from Kubernetes Documentation Maintainers on how to become a Kubernetes documentation contributor in a small team setting. This environment is perfect for new potential contributors who need a little extra help getting started or feel more comfortable learning in smaller groups.
Figure 8-5. Kubernetes Documentation SIG website home page.
Kubernetes IBM Cloud SIG
If you are interested in following the evolution of the IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service and IBM Cloud Private platforms, this is the group for you. Many developers and leaders from IBM Cloud work openly in this group to determine the future of IBM contributions and involvement in the Kubernetes community. You can also interact directly with the team that builds and operates IBM Cloud. You can find more information on the group and its meetings at its GitHub page.