2021 — Year I want and do not want to remember!

9 min readDec 20, 2021

My 2021 story

It’s that time of the year again where I tend to look back over the year to see what all I have achieved in the past year and how I have improved myself as a human being.

Yeah 2021, sigh, a year that has changed me in every way I live, my thoughts, my life and left a deep impact on me. I will be dividing this year round up into two parts:

Personal front
Learnings and Community

Life-changing experiences: I do not want this post to be only about my personal learnings but surely want to talk about two major events that changed me in a big way are

30th April 2021: Worst day of my life, my elder brother passed away due to COVID-19. He fought for about a month but in the end, his body gave up on fighting the virus and he left me alone in this world with tons of responsibilities. I and my brother shared a very very strong bond and we always used to help each other. He was sharp and I went to him whenever I had to clarify issues or faced any problems in my life. Now this space is so empty, all festivals, holidays and that happiness has gone. The wheel of time will never stop and it will keep on going with many events in life but him not being present with me and my family will always be felt, the tears will always be there behind the smile. This whole incident made me realise that we should love our friends/family when they are alive, be with them more than often, take care of each other, talk often, show support as this is what life is about, spreading love and happiness. Now I have realised that anyone can die anytime so leave each moment happily and there is nothing more important than friends and family.

24th September: Best day of my life as I became a DAD!! Yes on this day my wife gave birth to our beautiful daughter “Rushika”. She is so little that it is hard to hold her in my arms but I am loving it to see her grow every day. This is an entirely new feeling of being responsible.

These instances have taught me:

Life can end at any moment so love the people who are alive.
Help people as I have seen people struggle through tough times.
Always be kind while talking as you may never know what other person might have gone through.
Talk to your friends as they love you and you need to spare time for them.
Life after a loss is super hard but you need to live for the ones you are alive and that is the reason I moved in with my parent permanently.

Even after what all happened on the personal front, I was able to do a lot of stuff in the cloud native space!

The CKS BOOK

So this year in January 2021 I wrote a book “Let’s learn CKS scenarios” which is based on Kubernetes CKS certification. I have sold more than 277 individual + 250 bulk copies generating more than 10k USD. It’s my first book and I am really happy with the response I got :)

And a big part of 2022 will be writing the CKA book that was requested the most after I published this book.

Streams:

I did a lot of Youtube streaming this year with 60 streams with amazing people ❤. We covered a wide variety of topics and a series of streams including:

Knative series -> https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5uLNcv9SibBb77B9zyQot2kwUrMM1otq

Rancher-Suse Open source projects(Kubewarden, Harvester, Epinio, Opni, Rancher desktop& Kim, FuseML) ->https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5uLNcv9SibB-7WUGePMaw3jdvmHzQ74S

CI/CD week ->https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5uLNcv9SibB-7WUGePMaw3jdvmHzQ74S

And you can check out all the past live streams here that include all of the above and Crossplane, Fission, Kubespehere, Chaos-mesh, Litmus, Thanos, Linkerd, Opstrace, SigNoz, TimscaleDb, RISC-V, Kubernetes Networking, Docker slim, kubeform , kubernetes configurator, K3ai, Okteto, Kubecost, Keptn, Teleport, KCP, Rust, CUE, ClusterAPI, Kubevirt, K0s, Talos, COSI, OpenEBS, OPA, Kyverno, vcluster, JsPolicy, GraalVM, WebAssembly!!

Isn’t that awesome 😎 Those who have stayed with the channel this year would have learned all of the above from amazing people in the industry!

Apart from this, I did post youtube uploads where I explored various cloud native technologies.

How do I create these videos?
I go through the docs and explore the product, then try to create the simplest possible explanation including a demo in less time. Example: The Portainer walkthrough is 1 hour of demo crunched in under 17 minutes and Kubestr covers all the commands possible with demo in under 13 minutes. I love doing this and many people have given positive feedback on this.

CNCFMinutes

Another interesting thing I started that people loved the most this year is my CNCFMinutes playlist. My mission is to make cloud native technology easy to explore and the CNCF landscape can be daunting for newcomers or ever for people who would just like to know about a piece of software without going into much detail. This is where my CNCFminutes videos come in handy, these videos describe a CNCF project in a few minutes so that people know what the project is, its features, architecture and how it works! Again this is hours of effort that I crunch and put in a single video. As of today, there are 20 CNCFMinutes videos that teach you about 20 different CNCF projects!

Twitch streams

I also started Twitch streams aimed to do a product walkthrough LIVE on twitch but later discontinued it as I thought video uploads are better. But I did four and uploaded them to my channel.

Apart from my regular YouTube uploads I collaborated with other people and participated in various events, webinars and conferences. So let's get started!

Events, Webinars, conferences and collaboration:

Deploying an App in Kubernetes with Saiyam Pathak : Bashwomen community Seema Saharan
Easy Kubernetes Volumes using Longhorn : Data on Kubernetes
GitOps at Scale Using Fleet : GitOps Days 2021
College to career and SWE to Cloud Roles : Kunal Kushwaha
Building a Kubernetes Based Cloud Platform at Civo [DevOps Deployed Ep. 05] : DevOps directive with Sid Palas
CNCFMinutes-Kubernetes, Flux & Falco : Cloud native Bangalore meetup
Introduction to CNCF in Hindi : Cloudshala
5 different ways to run Kubernetes clusters + learning resources : Cloud native hackathon
Power Level 9000! Improving Application Performance with Chaos Engineering : KUBECON EU 2021
Kubernetes power for VM’s using KubeVirt : AllDayDevOps
Various policy engines for Kubernetes policies : ContainerDays 2021
How to Gain Observability Into Your Kubernetes Workloads : CloudNative days with Kubernetes
Containers and Kubernetes : Docker Mumbai meetup
Preparing for the Certified K8s Security Specialist (CKS) Exam : Sysdig Webinar
Intro to Kubernetes monitoring : Civo Hackathon
Introduction to service meshes : Civo Webinar
Kubernetes Security using Kube-bench: Civo Webinar
Kubernetes Gateway API introduction: Civo Webinar
Kubernetes at Scale using Rancher Fleet : Docker bangalore &Malaysia joint meetup
Leverage Azure Tech Stack For Any Kubernetes Cluster Via Azure Arc : Azure Kubernetes Day
AMA CKA/CKAD : KCD Bengaluru

That totals to 4 Webinars, 6 Conferences, 5 Events/meetups and 5 collaborations.

Event Organizer:

First ever KCD Bengaluru with awesome organising team
CNCF Students Chapter
First ever Container Garage event : Joint event by Docker captains and CNCF Ambassadors

Certs Magic show :

An amazing group of people started cloudnative.tv : A series of great shows that runs throughout the week on the official CNCF channel. I am fortunate to be a part of it and run my show called “Certs Magic” show that aims to help people prepare for Kubernetes certifications. Here is the complete playlist that you can watch.

Blogs

A lot of people out there love to read blogs as well and I wrote a few this year which were published on Civo, Codefresh, Dzone and my personal website.

Civo Academy

Want to learn Kubernetes for free? Civo academy is your answer!!
A lot of people have been asking me to create a Kubernetes course, I started with this idea of Academy and curated the content that will teach everyone Kubernetes from the ground up. The course is free and there are different instructors who recorded different sections. Go signup and learn now if you haven't already done so!

Annoucement blog
Academy link

Youtube Memberships

A support program that I started recently so that people and organizations can support my channel and the work I am doing for the community. My channel has helped many people and that is the reason I never stopped producing awesome content. I think the work I do can help your product reach out to professionals and give you the visibility that is needed. So if you are a startup then reach out to me and would be happy to help.

I have fantastic 10+ Youtube members who joined at the various tiers and a couple at Platinum tier.

Note: The platinum tier is going to be removed soon and there will be a separate prospectus with benefits for Organizations.

All the content on YouTube is and will always remain free!

Membership link

Newsletter:

I get to know a lot of information from various newsletters that I have subscribed to and I decided to start my own Newsletter this year and I am glad I did as these contain all the information that I go through personally, read personally or find interesting. I have received great feedback so I will keep writing the newsletter in 2022 as well.

Subscribe to the newsletter here if you want them straight in your inbox!

I have created 5 issues and all of them have tremendous content from where you can learn a lot, this is me talking straight to you.

KCNA Exam SME :

Kubernetes and Cloud Native Associate is a beginner level certification who enters in Kubernetes and CNCF world. I was fortunate to be a part of the creation of the exam. It is an MCQ type exam that covers Kubernetes and cloud native ecosystem. It was fun working with the other SME’s and the exam has been well received by the community.

Apart from this, I have my day job at Civo where I work on many initiatives and we as a team have done quite a lot of stuff this year and will double down our efforts next year.

Overall I am happy with all my learnings and community work and even some of my new initiatives that have turned out well!

If you want to support my work then check out the membership program and subscribe to my YouTube channel.
If you want to connect with me then follow me on Twitter or join my Discord server.
If you want to move to cloud or move to Kubernetes or move from one cloud provider to Civo Kubernetes then DM me on Twitter and I will help you out. I am very confident that we are building something great out there for the community keeping the costs in mind.

Thank you all for being with me, supporting me and motivating me to do more! Hopefully, 2022 will be a better year and I would be able to meet you people IRL.

Much Love
Saiyam Pathak