Left Red Hat .. Again, to start something on my own

Yesterday (2nd Dec’15) was my last day at Red Hat  (again). I left Red Hat in Dec’08 to join a startup and then joined back on Sept’12 .  This time I worked in the performance engineering team, which does performance evaluation of all the Red Hat products. It was best team I worked so far. I did performance benchmarking for products like Gluster, OpenStack, Docker, OpenShift. All of these products do not work in silos, so integration was another major thing I learned. I also got opportunities to attend and present at many international and national conferences like Red Hat Summit,  LinuxCon, DockerCon, DevConf etc. As last time it was great learning experience and I would always cherish the memories.

To make things more interesting this time I would be trying something on my own to do training and consulting for containers technologies like Docker, Kubernetes, Project Atomic, OpenShift v3, CoreOS etc. By looking at the trend, it looks companies would be going to production with containers in next year or so. Containers eases the dev to production cycles but it comes with initial cost, which is steep learning curve for  Dev, QA and OPs guys. To manage frequent release cycles and to keep the cost low, companies have to embrace Microservices and DevOps practices.  For the small companies and start-ups this shift would less painful than compared to big corporations. 

As this shift happens I believe we would see demand for skilled people who can understand the technology and help companies to do the transition.  Companies would also need help in choosing the right tools to fit into their stack as there are lots options; for example if you want  create cluster of nodes to run containers, would you choose Docker Swarm or Kubernetes or something else.  With that in mind I thought of venturing into consulting and training space. To start with I would be giving free hands-on workshops over the  duration of 2 months in different cities of India. The content of the training would open-sourced to keep it upto date and have people access to it whenever they need.

Lets see how things turn out.