HN851: Inside the Certified Kubernetes Network Engineer (CKNE) Program

Ethan Banks (0:00)

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On today's episode, we are covering the brand new Certified Kubernetes Network Engineer program with Nico Vibert. Nico helped create this certification and is writing a study guide for the program to be published by O'Reilly in 2027 Nico Vibert, it's very nice of you to join us. And this is your first time on Heavy Networking, I believe. So why don't you tell the folks who you are and what you do?

Nico Vibert (1:48)

Yeah, thanks. Thanks for having me. Delighted to be here. So I'm Nico Vibert. I am a Principal Technical Marketing Engineer at ISOVALENT, the company that is behind the Cilium project that I think you did a podcast about it a couple of years ago.

And we were acquired by Cisco about two years ago now. So at ISOVALENT, like I said, I'm part of the technical marketing team. So our job is to explain our solutions in terms that the common human beings can understand. And as a former network engineer, as a former CCI myself, what I'm really trying to do is to explain things like Kubernetes Networking and EDPF in a way that network engineers can understand. That's one of my goals.

Ethan Banks (2:40)

Yeah, you got a tough job, a technical marketing engineer. People hear marketing and they think that, oh, it's just a marketing person, they don't know anything. No, technical marketing engineer, you have to understand the technology absolutely deeply, and be able to be an engineer at the highest level, and then explain it to people in a way that they can understand, which is a super hard job.

Nico Vibert (2:57)

I know that it's great. I get to work with some of the people who literally created EDPF and Selium, and they are so smart, and the work they have done really influence networking and Linux broadly.

And to be able to kind of translate their amazing technology into something that everyone can understand is a challenge, but I relish it.

Ethan Banks (3:27)

Okay.

Okay, so Certified Kubernetes Network Engineer. This is a new cert. By the time we've published this podcast, it should have just been announced at KubeCon. And you've been involved in this as it's been developed in the back channel and so on. Why don't you introduce it for us? What's the CKNE all about?

Nico Vibert (3:46)

Yeah, so the CKNE, as you said, is a brand new certification. It was actually announced during the last year's KubeCon in Atlanta. That was the first time it was brought up publicly.

And it's a brand new certification testing candidates on their knowledge of Kubernetes networking. And it's something that many DevOps engineers and network engineers have actually been crying out for. They've been looking for a challenge, looking to prove that they understand something that honestly can be quite complex just because of the nature of Kubernetes and because of how Kubernetes have had to kind of almost recreate the full networking stack inside Kubernetes, if you like. So it's a great challenge. But I think so far people have really enjoyed going through some of the beta testing.

Drew Connery-Murray (4:52)

So what's some of the history leading up to the CKNE? It sounds like is this being driven by requests from the community or what's pushing it?