Southbridge with its Slurm is the only company in Russia that has (Kubernetes Training Provider).
Slurm is one year old. During this time, 800 people have completed our Kubernetes intensives. It's time for memoirs.
On September 9-11 in St. Petersburg, the Selectel conference hall will host another , fifth in a row. There will be an introduction to Kubernetes: each participant will create a cluster in the Selectel cloud and deploy an application there.
Under the cut - the history of Slurm, from the idea to the present day.
Pavel Selivanov at the opening of Slurm-4
And Kubernetes struck
In 2014, the first version of Kubernetes was released. In 2018, the hype rose in Russia: in Yandex, the number of Kubernetes requests increased from 1000 per month to 5000, and this word was increasingly heard in negotiations. Businesses have not yet believed in Kubernetes, but they are already actively looking at it.
In 2018, we saw that Kubernetes is gaining momentum, and only a couple of people fully own it in the company. Two people is much better than none, but far less than we need. There are simply no decent courses on the market. Send people nowhere. And we made an obvious decision: we are doing internal courses so that the masters will teach the rest.
Igor Olemskoy
Southbridge CEO
But you can’t just take and teach people. At Southbridge, everyone works remotely, you can’t gather people in the office, they need to be transported from Chelyabinsk, Khabarovsk and Kaliningrad. Kubernetes is a complex topic, you won’t master it in a couple of hours, and not everyone is able to put off all things for a week.
And it’s not so easy to transfer knowledge, you can’t sit in front of a webcam and put everything you know into your colleagues’ heads. You need to structure the material, plan a lecture, prepare a presentation, come up with a practical task.
In order for the training to take place, it is necessary to prepare a program, rent a hotel, pull everyone out of the routine, seat them in a conference room and download knowledge into their heads using the express method.
And if we rent a hotel and a conference room for our own, why not sell a dozen seats? Let's get some money for tickets.
Thus the idea of Slurm was born.
"Slurm-1": the first time always hurts
The concept of the first Slurm was constantly changing. We will hold it in the Programmers' Village near Kirov. No, we are moving to a hotel near Moscow. We make a program for a week. No, for 3 days. We count on 30 participants. No, at 50. We practice on laptops. No, in a cloud cluster.
I already had experience teaching people how to use Kubernetes, so the first program consisted of what I usually told fellow administrators. And it was for a week. Then it turned out that no one wants to drop out of life for the sake of our training, and by joint efforts we reduced the program to 3 days: we removed all the water, replaced the theory with practical tasks to the maximum and along the way rebuilt the program so that it was useful not only to admins , but also to developers whose applications run on k8s.
Pavel Selivanov
Speaker Slurm
Southbridge employees meet in person for the first time
20 people from Southbridge came to study at Slurm. We sold another 30 tickets for 25 rubles (which is very cheap considering accommodation) almost without advertising, and another 000 people registered in the waiting queue. It became clear that the demand for such courses is huge.
On August 2, 2018, the members arrive at the hotel, and a flurry of organizational problems hits us hard on the head.
The conference room where the Slurm is supposed to take place has not yet been refurbished. There are no tables: either the delivery from Ikea was delayed, or the hotel was not going to buy them, and they hung noodles on our ears. A third of the rooms are uninhabitable. The hotel administration looks like it was milking commerce just yesterday, and the girls at the reception are tortured like those same commerce.
Slurm will start in this hall in 20 hours
After the first Slurm, I developed Vietnamese Syndrome. I personally check the halls that we rent, count the tables, sit on local chairs, taste the food, ask me to show the numbers.
Anton Skobin
commercial director Southbridge
We sit almost on each other's knees.
Nevertheless, on the first day, all burning issues were resolved: tables were collected from the entire hotel, the reception and the dining room were “robbed”, the most affected guests were accommodated in Korston in nearby Serpukhov, at the same time they paid for a taxi, arranged water supply and food.
On the second day, when the situation calmed down, we decided that we should apologize to the guests. We went to the Metro and bought 100 liters of Guinness. If we could not provide comfort in the hall and in the rooms, at least we will brighten up the evening for people.
Igor Olemskoy
What do admins do after a hard day at work?
Despite all the problems, people liked what they were driving for: the content. Therefore, on the third day of Slurm, we decided to repeat it in the fall. Along the way, we interviewed participants on topics of interest and gathered a reserve for an advanced program. We named it "MegaSlurm".
Slurm-2: work on the bugs
Slurm needs a proper hotel. We choose the five-star "Tsargrad".
There are more applicants than the hall can accommodate, and not everyone can afford a business trip. We organize remote classes: online broadcast, communication in the telegram channel, a support group to help remote students.
There are a lot more students. We systematize and automate processes: creating clusters, distributing accesses, collecting questions from the audience.
We no longer made organizational decisions in a hurry, but created the technology of the event.
There is already a decent hall, and there are enough tables for everyone.
Now conceptual problems are revealed.
People don't want to go to a country hotel. We thought it was cool: to escape from the routine, to go where work and household chores will not catch up with you, to plunge into Kubernetes up to your ears. Turns out it was too much pressure. In addition, the hotel hurts the budget of the event.
Financial departments don't want to pay their employees to study in the hall when there is a cheaper one online. But we conceived online as a palliative for those who live in the far corners of Russia and in other countries, and were not going to turn Slurm into a three-day webinar.
I was especially pleased that 40 people came to MegaSlurm, although we initially counted on 15-20. Among them are many participants of the first Slurm.
The first sale is marketing. The second sale is the quality of the product. Since the second Slurm, we've been evaluating our work by the people who sign up for all of our programs and by the companies that send employees to us over and over again. We have already officially made a club discount for them.
Anton Skobin
Slurm-3: Hello Peter!
We hold Slurm in St. Petersburg. We make the same price for "live" and remote participation.
And we miss the size of the hall.
We choose a small neat hall for 50 people. Applications are slowly dripping, and suddenly the end of December comes. Companies are beginning to rapidly master the budgets of 18 and literally buy up all the places in a week.
Throughout January, people write: “We are from St. Petersburg, we just found out, we want to go to the hall, please find a place.” And we're adding 20 more places. According to the calculations, it turned out that everyone would fit, but when we start to arrange the tables, it turns out very crowded.
At the third Slurm, the requirements for the size, layout and equipment of the hall crystallize.
As usual, a new layer of problems is revealed: our speakers are cool as techies, but not as teachers. It is not enough to have a good program, you need to convey it to the audience.
After the third Slurm, the project has methodological support.
My sister works in education: organizes and conducts master classes, seminars, intensives. Including trains school teachers and speakers. I called her for help.
Anton Skobin
I worked with the speakers, explained what the learning process looks like, what an interactive lecture is, how to keep students' attention. For example, if you talk non-stop for a long time, be sure that people will miss half of it. Worked out presentations, interactive. Conducted public speaking classes for children.
At the same time, we decided to invite speakers from outside, so as not to get hung up on the experience and practices of Southbridge.
Olga Skobina
Slurm Methodist
When I prepare, first of all I try to understand how I myself came to this knowledge. Why did I need it and what difficulties did I face. Then I try to systematize it all, turn to the documentation, clarify for myself some points that I did not pay attention to before. I definitely think over practical tasks so that people do not just listen, but do it with their hands. Then the most difficult things need to be visualized on slides. And rehearse with real people. Usually we ask one of our colleagues to listen to the material, go through practical tasks and express how everything is clear, difficult, useful.
Pavel Selivanov
Slurm-4: chrysalis turned into a butterfly
The fourth Slurm was a breakthrough: 120 participants in the hall, a presenter, a methodologist, a support group of 20 people, everything was polished and rehearsed.
... I remember Slurm-4 in Moscow. Somehow it happened that it was on it that I first began to think not about how I would conduct the lesson, whether I would say everything in the text, whether I would not forget anything, but about how well the audience understood me. As far as I was able to convey my idea and explain how the technology works. It's quite an interesting change that has taken place within me. I began to look differently at the preparation process, and at our courses themselves.
Pavel Selivanov
How far have we come from the first Slurm...
There was a bit of shame. With the words “We are admins, networkers, we will now spread our super-super wifi”, we set up access points, then someone touched the network wire going to Mikrotik with his foot, he connected via Wi-Fi to a neighboring point, a ring formed. As a result, for the first half of the day, “our fashionable Wi-Fi” barely worked.
The story of my whole life: as soon as you start to show off, there is a fierce fakap. There was no need to change a working solution just because we have cooler equipment <…>
But I was pleased that people, sitting on the basic course, bought tickets for the advanced course. If a person, listening to our speakers, is ready to pay 45 thousand right here and now to listen to them for another 3 days, it means something.Anton Skobin
The secret of success
A year ago, we stole tables from the cafeteria to seat 50 participants.
Now we have been certified by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.
The next Slurm takes place in September in St. Petersburg, Selectel invited us to their conference hall.
Recorded and sold online version of the courses.
We are looking at foreign countries: we are negotiating with Kazakhstan and Germany.
It's time to reveal the secret of success.
But he is not.
One could say: you just need to do your job well. But in my life I did a lot of things well, and what's the point? We can say: the team decides. But there were sensible teams in my life that could not break away from the bottom. In every success story, I see a combination of fortunate circumstances. And in ours - first of all.
Anton Skobin
A hot topic fell into my hands just in time. There were experts ready to explain it. They agreed to become leaders. There was money for the organization. Every time we ran into frames, the right person appeared on the horizon. Everything coincided in the most favorable way.
And most importantly, a great audience. People whom we remember by sight and by name, and we greet each other at a chance meeting. If there were a little more criticism, and a little less gratitude, we would not dare to continue after the first Slurm.
But still…
Accidents are not accidental.
Oog-way
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Source: habr.com