Bitnami's 5th Edition Bootcamp a Big Success

Over a five day period that wrapped up last Friday, Bitnami delivered a fast-paced course about managing cloud-native applications using Docker and Kubernetes. This event has served as a recruiting tool since 2014. Now it is the time for evaluating attendees’ projects and for identifying potential members of the Bitnami team! Read on to find out the highlights of the latest Bitnami Bootcamp. 

Why Kubernetes was the main topic of this Bootcamp? 

Since 2015, Bitnami has published and maintained a catalog of more than 130 containerized applications and has promoted Kubernetes as the preferred way to manage container workloads in production.

In addition, Bitnami has created or contributed to key projects in the Kubernetes landscape:

• Helm: The most popular package manager for Kubernetes. Bitnami is one of its contributors and maintains its own application repository. 
• Kubeapps: A web-based user interface used to deploy, monitor, upgrade or delete charts on Kubernetes.
• Bitnami Kubernetes Production Runtime (BKPR): A collection of production-level infrastructure services for Kubernetes clusters. 
• Kubeless: A Kubernetes native serverless framework. 
• Kubecfg: A tool for managing complex enterprise Kubernetes environments as code. 
• Sealed Secrets: A tool for safely storing and managing Kubernetes secrets in a public repository. 

Consistent with this view, last year we decided to move all our projects from dedicated servers to a centralized one that runs several Kubernetes clusters. We embraced the technology we promote to deliver our services and improve our internal operations. 

Bitnami Bootcamp is always oriented to the technology that Bitnami is using internally at the time, so it was no surprise that Kubernetes was the centerpiece of this edition.

Bitnami Bootcamps: sharing knowledge and recruiting talent

At Bitnami, we continuously share our knowledge by contributing to numerous  Kubernetes projects and by attending and speaking at prominent events such as KubeCon and Docker Summit. You can visit our Newsroom to see all the events that Bitnami has participated in.

As part of this collaborative philosophy, our bootcamps are designed as a way to share Bitnami’s know-how with the next generation of software developers. Since the first bootcamp in 2014, these courses have covered several areas related to system administration that range from cloud deployment on the main cloud providers platforms to server application deployment.

We are very happy with the success of this edition: we received more than 50 applications,  interviewed almost all candidates, and 16 were selected to participate. Their profile was a mixture of recent graduates and engineers with more than five years of experience working in software companies.

During this five day training, Bitnami engineers, Javier Salmerón, Juan Ariza, and Juan José Martos taught participants the most advanced practices for writing Dockerfiles, deploying containers, and managing a Kubernetes production cluster.

For their part, the bootcampers had to deliver four assessments and one final project. Once evaluated, we will be able to select the most skilled engineers to hire.  We are currently in the evaluation process, so stay tuned: the Bitnami team is about to grow!

5th Edition Bitnami Bootcamp attendees

Bootcamps are a good way to find new candidates, but not the only way that Bitnami recruits talent. If you are interested in joining a diverse and globally distributed team, check out our open positions and apply!

Apply now

2nd Bitnami Cloud Bootcamp - February 2015

We held our first Bitnami Cloud Bootcamp in September 2014. The interest surpassed all of our expectations and the bootcamp itself was a success, covering a wide variety of technologies and attracting a diverse group of talented individuals. After the training, we invited six of them join the Bitnami team and they are responsible for many of the recent application releases in Bitnami.

As promised, we are excited to announce the 2nd Bitnami Cloud Bootcamp! Bitnami bootcamps are fast-paced, in-person training courses that provide you with the knowledge and practical skills you need to automate the installation and management of server software in the cloud. You will learn directly from developers and system administrators responsible for systems that manage tens of thousands of servers. At the end of the course, if you have performed well, we will make you a job offer to join Bitnami. In other words, if you are located in Spain and passionate about Linux, Open Source and Cloud you should seriously consider applying.

The original bootcamp was 4 weeks long and that limited the amount of candidates that could attend, so we have decided to change the format this time around and run a 2 weeks Bootcamp. This way, currently employed attendees may be able to take vacation time in order to attend the training. Depending on how this experiment turns out we may be go back to the original format or run smaller, more frequent bootcamps.

This Bootcamp will run from February 16th to the 27th, this time at our office in Seville, rather than a third-party training facility. In the last few months, we have tripled the size of our office and have everything in place to conduct the bootcamp, including space, connectivity and snacks :)

Of course, since we are running the Bootcamp for a shorter period of time, we have also limited the scope of what we will teach in the course while still covering all the important areas. For example, while the original bootcamp covered Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Azure, in this edition we will only cover Amazon Web Services because the concepts are similar across all major cloud platforms.

For this edition we will require applicants to have a working knowledge of Linux. Though we covered the basics in our previous one, the candidates that were not already familiar with Linux had a harder time following along and the more experienced participants did not get as much out of it. A good, free, online introduction to Linux is offered by the Linux Foundation in partnership with edX. Please make sure you attend the course (or already have the knowledge described in it) before applying.

For more information and to apply for this edition, please visit our bootcamp page.

Bitnami Bootcamp 2014

Earlier this summer, we announced the first Bitnami Cloud System Administration Bootcamp with the goal of sharing the know-how we have accumulated over the years at Bitnami to train the next generation of system administrators. Over the course of a few weeks, we received over a hundred applications, from which we invited 14 candidates to participate after an extensive selection process and one-on-one interviews.

Over a four week period that just wrapped up last week, we geeked out on Linux and the cloud. The mornings covered mostly theory (albeit with small interactive examples) while the afternoons were devoted to practical exercises. Each student managed their cloud servers using Bitnami Cloud Hosting (of course!) and we tracked and reviewed all assignments using a Bitnami-hosted Phabricator server. We started out learning about system internals, Git, bash scripting, networking and Unix build toolchains. We continued with the ins and outs of automating the deployment of apps written in a variety of languages and frameworks: PHP, Python, Java, Rails and Node.js. We invited guest speakers that covered in-depth a variety of topics, including Tomcat, OpenStack and configuration management tools. We explored the AWS, Azure and Google clouds, learning how to servers in each one of them both through the management console and their APIs/command line tools. We learned how to perform end to end deployment automation using Docker, Ansible and Bitnami tools. We ended with sessions on security and performance and built a project that brought together everything we covered in the course.

After the bootcamp, we invited six of the attendees to join the Bitnami team and they will start this Wednesday! We are excited to have these awesome engineers as part of the team and you can expect a significant increment in the number of apps we provide in the near future thanks to our expanded team.

We plan to repeat the experience early next year, expanding and improving the topics and materials. If this sounds interesting to you, consider applying and joining us next year in Seville!

Cloud System Administration Bootcamp 2015 early sign up