Cloud Global

Background 

When Covid seemed to be over and there was a mandate to come in to the office at least 3 days a week I must admit that I was sceptical if it would increase my productivity. During Covid I had invested in a standing desk and a big monitor so I felt I was more productive working from home. But I remember an executive during a Town Hall telling us to be intentional when we come in to the office, not sit in Webex all the time but interact with the colleagues we meet face to face, through mentoring, knowledge sharing and so on. I tried it out and felt energised. One of the knowledge sharing sessions was a weekly OpenShift hands-on lab for my QRadar Support colleagues.

Career Week

The turning point was the Global Support Career Week, where I offered to contribute with a hands-on OpenShift lab to the whole IBM Campus in Dublin, Ireland, which had a good turnout. Since then, I started announcing my weekly labs all over Campus and after a few weeks we no longer fit in the room. So far the most visited session had more than 30 attendees in person. At this time, we have more than a hundred OpenShift enthusiasts on the Slack channel.

Las Vegas

The next news is that the OpenShift hands-on labs was made available to our clients and Business Partners, during the TechXchange in October 2024 which was held in Las Vegas. Here's the announcement:

(1236) Red Hat OpenShift hands-on lab: Get hands-on with Red Hat OpenShift. Bring your own laptop. We will provide you with kubeadmin credentials to a shared temporary OpenShift cluster, and with suggested exercises for both advanced and completely new users. Your instructors: Eric Bos is a Red Hat certified specialist in OpenShift Administration, in his day job he is a Subject Matter Expert for Cloud Pak for Security and the QRadar Suite, Saif Ur Rehman is a Red Hat certified architect, working as a Solutions Architect for Red Hat Digital Sales.

Kubernetes hands-on lab

I noticed that there was going to be a pre-conference in Las Vegas for the Open Source Community, so I offered my lab as a Kubernetes hands-on lab as well. That gave us 10 complimentary conference passes to give away to customers and Business Partners who are affiliated with the Open Source Community, see https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ericbos_join-my-kubernetes-hands-on-lab-at-the-techxchange-activity-7244238076124831745-MmOJ?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop

Prequel: ITEC Summit 2022

As a member of the IBM Academy of Technology, I was involved in the yearly IBM internal conference of the ITEC, the Irish affiliate. I remember before Covid, I proposed to have hands-on labs, so we had a cybersecurity CTF game, an AI chatbot lab, and a Red Hat OpenShift lab that I organised, inviting a Solution Architect from Red Hat.

Why did I certify in Red Hat?

Some factors that played in to my decision to certify in Red Hat OpenShift:

1. As  a Senior Customer Engineer in MaaS360 mobile device management, I had noticed a decline in the business and was looking for another role. So I had a lot of downtime to invest in learning new skills.
2. During Covid lockdown we were working from home, so I could concentrate on my learning.
3. My manager offered me a Red Hat Learning Subscription that gave me access to a virtual lab environment.
4. One of my mentors was already OpenShift certified and he recommended some learning material on O'Reilly by Sander van Vugt.
5. One of our executives, at his closing plenary of an IBM internal conference in 2019, said it would be good if all of the technical leaders could get Red Hat certified. See below picture.
6. The certification exam is hard, you are put into the role of a consultant who needs to perform certain tasks within a short time, using only the official documentation. I failed twice but once I passed, the doors opened to my next role as a Cloud Pak for Security Deployment Specialist and then also to my next role as a member of the IBM Security SWAT Team.

Lessons learned from Red Hat OpenShift hands-on labs at TechXchange 2024 in Las Vegas

1. Separate sessions for beginners, intermediate and advanced OpenShift users.
1. For the beginners, do a guided exercise.
2. For the intermediate, do an advanced guided exercise.
3. For the advanced, classify the exercises by increasing difficulty.
4. For the very advanced, I can do a session on installing Red Hat OpenShift.
2. Environment like the one I used for my Kubernetes labs.
3. Bigger room, for at least 50 attendees.
4. Inform the hotel SOC that there will be 50 students accessing the 20 labs at the same time, so they don't think it is a DOS attack.

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Eric Bos

Senior Customer Support Engineer

IBM

Ireland

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