Donations during the pandemic – part 2

Donation to a senior home in Pest county

In early 2021 we got in contact with a senior home in Pest county.

In the first wave of the pandemic, senior homes in Hungary were heavily hit by the covid-19. The nurses, doctors and all staff working in these institutions were working hard to take care of their residents. We are really proud of all the people working in the healthcare industry regardless of their position or what kind of work they are doing.

We offered the staff of the senior home to deliver them some goodies. The “care packages” contained all the sweets, snacks, coffee, soft drinks they put on our shopping list in the value of 40,000 HUF.

Thank you for your hard work and contribution to the society’s well-being!

 

 

Donations during the pandemic – part 1

Donations to the employees of Szent Imre Hospital

Our company donated 10 high-end laptops with an approximate gross value 3 million HUF to the employees of Szent Imre Hospital.
The donation was received by those nurses, auxiliary nurses, cleaning ladies, admin colleagues whose family and children would need a computer because of home schooling or simply they could not afford a modern laptop.

For the post from the Szent Imre Hospital click HERE

“Ten of our colleagues were made happy by the donation of Component Soft.
The Újbuda-based company not only offered high-end laptops to our staff but also provided the software required for immediate usage.
„When we feel that we cannot longer bear the enormous load, we receive a huge package of love like this which helps and immediately recharges us. It is infinitely touching that they thought about us and help us to make our everyday lives easier.” – said nurse Márti, whose high school boy received a great help with this machine.
Thank you for your generous donation!”

For the article in our local newspaper about our donation click HERE

Component Soft celebrates 25th anniversary

Near the end of December, Component Soft held its 25 year celebration, with employees attending. We reminisced about our triumphs and the hardships the company faced over the years. The 25th year itself has been quite momentous, with us surpassing 2,000 OpenStack and Kubernetes course participants by the time it started. We sponsored Open Infrastructure Days UK 2019 and KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2019, and we also presented at the Cloud Native London April 2019 Meetup.

An additional excitement was that we sponsored a high school robotics team to compete in the World Robot Olympiad for the first time, and they placed 2nd in the national competition.

Here’s to another 25 years on the frontiers of IT training.

 

 

 

Component Soft is a Silver Sponsor of TechWeek Frankfurt 2019

From 13 to 14 November, we attended and sponsored the TechWeek Frankfurt 2019 conference. As a Silver Sponsor, we met plenty of cloud professionals at our stand, but our most important moment was our CTO Laszlo holding a talk titled ‘Istio, Linkerd Intro – Let your Developers enhance your business with Service Mesh, not a technical Mess!’

The abstract of the talk:

With the advancement in cloud technologies and CI/CD tools, developers can release software at an ever-increasing pace. Service meshes allow developers to delegate networking related tasks (authentication, admission control, encryption, traffic routing, failure handling) to the underlying infrastructure, and concentrate on the business problems they need to solve.

About TechWeek Frankfurt:

 „COVERING THE ENTIRE TECHNOLOGY ECOSYSTEM” Located in Germany’s data, finance and security hub, Germany’s largest disruptive technology event, incorporating Cloud Expo Europe, DevOps Live, Cloud & Cyber Security Expo, Smart IoT, Big Data World, Blockchain Technology World and Data Centre World.

The 7 co-located events offer an unmissable opportunity to help you navigate the best route to your digital transformation. As you can explore, over 2 days in 1 location, ALL the latest emerging technologies to help YOUR business.”

Our Sponsored team placed 2nd in WRO Hungary

Back in September of 2018, Our CEO, Erno returned to his old highschool in the Hungarian city of Kaposvár, to fund the creation of a robotics team in the school. The team chose KTMGo as their name, and their first season proved to be quite successful.

Even though they just started their run in robotics competitions, KTMGo placed 2nd in the national round of the World Robot Oplimpiad. With their eyes on the gold medal next year, our team is eager to get back to the drawing board, improving their skills in designing and programming these little robots.

Openstack Summit 2018 Berlin #Recap

In November 2018 the Openstack Summit took place in Berlin, and we can proudly say that the Component Soft Team were there as a sponsor. We had a great time in Berlin. Here is a short summary about our Summit experiences.


From left: Emese Schwindt (Education Coordinator, Erno Erdelyi (CEO) Róbert Varjasi (Cloud Engineer) László Budai (CTO)

For us the highlight of the conference was our CTO László’s intensive training „Kubernetes Administration 101: from Zero to (junior) Hero”.


László during his presentation

In this training, 70 participants were able to learn the main concepts and daily administration tasks of Kubernetes.  Main topics were: Linux container and Kubernetes Intro, Accessing Kubernetes and access control, Workloads, Accessing applications, Persistent storage.


70+ attendees at László’s mini training

If you were there, we hope that you enjoyed it. If you couldn’t attend, you can reach the presentation slides here.


Our stand in the Marketplace

During László’s presentation (and through the Summit) you could meet with us in the Marketplace, talk a little bit, or participate in our game and win a Component Soft power bank or the main prize, a free seat on one of our live online Openstack or Kubernetes trainings.



If you participated in our little rubber duck game, you could win various prizes.

The happy winner of the main prize was Mr. Jyoti Prakash Panda from Infosys India.


And the winner is…

We had an amazing time at the OpenStack Summit in Berlin and hope you did as well. It was great to meet you personally, and we hope to see everyone again in the new year ?

If you’re intrested, here is an another summary about the Summit: http://superuser.openstack.org/articles/icymi-openstack-berlin-summit/

The Kubernetes CKA exam: 10 + 1 tips for better chances

After our popular 10 exam tips for the COA exam post, we decided to provide our expertise on the Certified Kubernetes Administrator Exam (CKA).

Since we participated in the CKA beta testing, we have seen the exam’s development from its inception. We have collected our knowledge in this article.

Preparation

0.: Read the candidate handbook.

1.: The Exam environment

The CKA exam is remote-proctored, which means that you will have to have a webcam, so that the proctor can monitor you throughout the exam. In the beginning, they will check that you are the only person in the room.

2.: Make sure your internet connection is reliable and fast.

  1. Only the browser (at this time, only Chrome and Chromium browsers are supported) may be running and only tabs related to the exam may be opened

Naturally, the terminal where you solve the questions must be open. Other than that, you can open the official K8S documentation – which we recommend you do.

Please note that pre-created exam specific templates are PROHIBITED

Taking the CKA exam

3.: Do exactly what the question tells you to do.

It is important not to deviate from instructions. This means that for example if it’s a POD they ask for, it’s a POD not a deployment with one POD.

4.: It can take 3 hours

Candidates will have 3 hours to complete the exam tasks, but the introduction will also need time.

Make sure all your needs are tended to before you begin the exam. Specifically, be sure to drink and eat. Your brain works much better when you have energy. This is especially true of long, intensive tasks like an exam.

5: Learn to use kubectl explain command eg. kubectl explain pod

6.: Use kubectl commands to solve the questions or „create” the yaml files (-o yaml)

Do the work: Learn Kubernetes in the trenches

7.: Kubernetes is just like any other skill.

When you learn an instrument, at first you have to think about every move your fingers make. But eventually it’s all instinctive. The same is true in this case.

Make sure you use K8S on daily basis and you’ll be able to answer easy questions quickly and questions with medium difficulty won’t take much time either.

8.: Read Kubernetes the hard way

Kubernetes the hard way will walk you through the manual installation proces. You will learn how to install, configure, and to create encrypted connection between components.

This is a good opportunity to learn how different components work together.

9.: Make sure you understand the components that makes up the K8s cluster, how do they interact and what each component is responsible of, in order to be able to fix the issues for the troubleshooting tasks.

10.: Currently the exam runs on Ubuntu Linux 16. Make sure that you know how to interact with system services on this GNU Linux distribution.

Bonus: Take a course

+1: Our KBS-103: Kubernetes Admin training and Exam prep course is designed from the ground up to prepare you for the CKA exam. It will teach you all the necessary skills and knowledge you need to become a Certified Kubernetes Administrator. Our instructors are Certified Kubernetes Administrators themselves, having taken the exam – we used their experiences to collect this list.

 

 

We were at the OpenStack UK Day!

Erno’s presentation

The long awaited OpenStack UK day took place on the 26th of September in London. Component Soft participated in the event, as Gold level Sponsors, so we’d set up a booth to meet and greet and we also presented on 2 different topics regarding OpenStack.

A summary of the day’s events

Our first presentation – by Csaba, our OpenStack specialist – was about using Elastic stack for logging and Prometheus for monitoring your OpenStack.

Prometheus is a new monitoring tool specifically designed for cloud technologies like Kubernetes, Docker, and now OpenStack.

His slides are available here. We will update this post with the video recording as soon as it is available.

These tools provide a handy way to monitor and log your OpenStack’s activity, helping with troubleshooting efforts.

Csaba even put together code for a test environment, that you can access here.

 

 

 

While Csaba was busy illuminating the attendees on his monitoring mojo, I was outside in the lobby, providing information about our various OpenStack and Open Cloud trainings. Interestingly we were the only dedicated training company sponsoring the event. Shoutout to our booth-neighbours, NGINX for the T-Shirts.

 

 

Our second presentation was a group effort. It was about the various official exams attached to Open Cloud technologies, like OpenStack’s Certified OpenStack Administrator, and the upcoming Certified Kubernetes Administrator exams. You can access the slides here.

The first part was about the market value of these exams, as presented by Erno, our CEO. These exams seem to be increasing in value and demand, both for Open Cloud professionals in the job market, as well as companies working with these technologies, to show they have the experts to help their clients.

 

 

 

In the second half of the presentation our instructors, Csaba and Agoston shared practical advice for these exams. Csaba is a Certified OpenStack Administrator, and he is the brain behind our 10 tips for better chances for the COA exam. Agoston had been participating in the beta test for the Certified Kubernetes Administrator exam over the summer. The exam itself only released a few days before the conference.

 

 

The conference was an amazing experience, and we are glad to have contributed our expertise to this gathering of OpenStack professionals. If you weren’t able to come, I hope you can next year!

David Erdelyi
Digital Marketing Manager, Component Soft

 

 

Our presentation on the OpenStack CEE day – Monitoring and logging OpenStack

OpenStack has evolved into a complex “Cloud Operating System” for datacenters with a lot of moving parts. Operators must be able to monitor, measure and troubleshoot OpenStack but that is not a trivial task.

In this presentation, originally recorded at the OpenStack CEE day 2017 in Budapest our instructor and consultant, Csaba Patyi talks about current solutions and practices and show what might be the future.

 

Csaba Patyi
Csaba Patyi is an IT Consultant and Instructor at Componentsoft Ltd. In this position he provides Level 3 support to one of the major Hungarian Telco companies. He regularly holds courses about OpenStack Administration, Linux Administration, Docker essentials and many more in Hungary and in other countries as well.
He has an OpenStack Administrator certification from Mirantis (MCA200) and from the OpenStack Foundation (COA) plus a Linux Administartor certification from the Linux Foundation (LFCS)