Year 2017, had been a great and eventful year for CloudYuga and me. We evolved everyday from our on-going learning. We hit few milestones and continue to make progress.
The year 2017, had been a great and eventful year for CloudYuga and me. We evolved every day
from our on-going learning. We hit few milestones and continue to make progress. Following
are few things, which kept us busy last year:-
Online Self Paced Courses
We launched/authored following online courses :-
– Containers Fundamentals
– Containers(Docker) for Dev and QA
– Introduction to Kubernetes MOOC on Edx via Linux Foundation
via which we trained close ~20K people around the world.
Corporate Trainings
Last year we added clients like Cisco, VMWare, Mercedes Benz, Amdocs and few others. Assignment
from new and existing clients kept us busy and helped us pay most of the bills.
Instructor Led Open Batches
In 2017, we did very little classroom training as managing them becomes very difficult. I did one
and Shiju conducted few Go Programming workshops.
Towards the end of 2017, we did our first online instructor-led training. We could attract participants
from outside Bangalore and India, which is good. As this was the first run of such training, there
were few shortcomings, which I hope to resolve in the next class.
Meetups/Conferences
As usual, we organized and participated in many meetups/conferences. Some interesting ones are:-
– Joint meetup with AWS, DevOps and Docker meetup at LinkedIn office, Bangalore
– Joint meetup with 8 different meetup on Microservices and Serverless at Walmart office, Bangalore
– DockerCon’17 – Austin
– Kubernetes 101 workshop at RootConf and PyCon India
– Keynote at DevOps India Days
– OpenSources India
– Joint meetup with Docker, Kubernetes and CNCF groups on KubeCon’17 review at MicroFocus office, Bangalore
I also got a chance to attend a Kubernetes meetup at Bay Area. It might be one off experience but based on that, I think we do better job in managing a meetup in India.
YC’s Startup School Program
I participated in YC’s first online startup school program between April to June’17. Their video lectures helped me understand – What to expect from entrepreneurship?
CloudYuga Acquisition
It did not happen !!!
To our surprise, few product companies approached for acquisition. That is because when they talk to their customers about their products, customers first want to know about containers, Docker, Kubernetes. By acquisition, interested companies wanted to have a training arm. With one of the company, the discussion went till the last stage but due to some unforeseen reason, it did not close. I guess, whatever happens, happens for good.
We spent quite a bit of time preparing the training plans, business leads, hiring, etc. Though it took
away some time from me I did learn lot of things. It gave me a new perspective, which will help in the future for sure. I am glad that we parted ways amicably.
Hiring
With the hiring experience of 2016, we were very cautious to hire new team members. We just confirm one of the intern as full-time employee.
Due to the in-between phase of a possible acquisition, we interviewed few candidates but those did not materialize due to failed acquisition. This was the most embarrassing experience of that acquisition process, as I had reached out to people who trusted me and in the end, things did not go as expected.
Certified Kubernetes Administrator exam
In Sept’17, CNCF launched Certified Kubernetes Administrator(CKA) exam. I must say the exam is challenging and tests to Kubernetes hands-on experience. Two of us from CloudYuga could clear the exam. We are also planning to launch a special training program for CKA in near future.
Marketing
For us most of the business came from a chain of trust. Though we also tried doing some active marketing:-
- Booth presense at RootConf’17, India
- Webinars for DigitalOcean, TechGig
- Social Media
As a part of the marketing effort, we also re-designed our website.
Thanks to everyone, who helped us succeed in 2017. Hope to continue making progress in 2018 !!
