Have you ever felt like it’s getting increasingly more difficult to become an expert in new technologies? Even if you are only looking to quickly try the hello-world example in your laptop without giving away credit card information. Projects currently labelled as “open-source”, with hundreds of thousands of community members are somehow inaccessible and distant. At the same time, the source code is available to anyone, so what’s the problem?

Cloud-native technology, specifically software designed to run in distributed systems, is very challenging to manage. While upstream communities can provide packaged solutions and comprehensive installation manuals, the matrix of configuration options is overwhelming! Who knows how to turn all the knobs and press all the buttons in a Kubernetes cluster to make it run optimally, and how much does it cost to learn how to do so?

This talk explores how we can learn from the path that Linux took to go from an inaccessible system, limited to a few in the 90s, to being in everybody’s pockets nowadays. It proposes a framework that upstream communities can utilize to make their software more accessible to people who want to use the technologies without being drowned in a sea of YAML. It also presents a few options for folks who want to get started with very complicated things, such as Kubernetes or OpenStack, on their own laptops!