Welcome to our series 8 on K8s where we interview interesting people in the Kubernetes community. In fact, check out our previous one with Rich Burroughs. If you’d like to be featured or know someone who’d be a great fit, tweet us and spread the love.
Suraj is a Senior Platform Engineer at RVU, CNCF Ambassador, and AWS Community Builder. His interest areas are Kubernetes, Terraform, Linux, AWS, and Golang. He shares his knowledge via his YouTube channel and blog posts. He also runs two newsletters, Suraj in Cloud and The Platform Engineering. He is an open source believer.
What’s the last book you read?
Minimalist Entrepreneur by Sahil Lavingia. From the book, I found the following quote very insightful: "You don't learn, then start. You start, then learn".
What problem are you trying to solve?
There’s a lot of educational material about cloud native and open source stuff, most of which helps learners kickstart Day 1. I am creating educational content that can help learners beyond Day 1, which consists of more in-depth knowledge and hands-on demonstrations. CLI (Command Line Interface) tools are always my favorite topic. Recently, I open sourced my kubectl EKS plugin and will build a simplified AWS CLI in public.
What’s an interesting trend you’ve observed in our industry?
Adoption of platform engineering. I am a platform engineer by profession, and I believe in the principles of platform engineering.
What’s the last thing you read about our industry that got you really fired up?
A few weeks back, I read several articles saying that DevOps is dead and SRE is dead. I mean, nothing is dead. The system administrator is still a valid thing. It all depends on the requirements of the company.
What do you do that helps you maintain balance in your life?
I wake up early to get extra time to work on a personal or hobby project and read books. I rely on productivity apps such as TickTick and stick to my schedule. I spend the evenings and weekends with my family. This way, I maintain a work-life balance.
What’s the biggest risk you’ve ever taken?
Moving to London away from friends and family. At the time, I relocated to a new country and also transitioned from a software engineer to a platform engineer. Almost everything was new to me except Kubernetes and Golang. 😀 But since then, I have learned a lot, and London is my home now.
Who do you look up to in the industry?
Vishal Biyani, CTO of Infracloud. I have learned many things from him on social media and in real life. Also, I have seen the growth of Infracloud under his leadership, which is quite phenomenal.
Can you hold two contradictory thoughts in your mind simultaneously without feeling uncomfortable?
Yep, absolutely. When writing test cases for the code, we imagine developing all the possible use cases. Similarly, we think of all the instances in every situation, even if they contradict each other, and make an informed call. Then, at least, we have clearer visibility.
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