Cloud Native Edge Essentials: Strategies Empowering Change and Innovation

We ran a successful Book Sprint with SUSE last August 5-9, 2024 in Washington, D.C., under the facilitation of Jana Mendelski. We joined 16 authors for five days of intense collaborative writing to create the tell-all guide for edge computing. 

Motivated by innovative spirit and a desire to share their real-world experience with Edge, the team at SUSE came together to write this book. As Keith Basil, Vice President and General Manager at SUSE said in his foreword,

“And finally, we realize that edge computing “unknown unknowns” will continue to arise. Truthfully, this is what excites us most about cloud native edge computing. Every day presents a new opportunity to do something that has never been done before. The edge is where computing meets the real world and the use cases can be truly fascinating. The feeling of knowing that we are collectively shaping the push of global innovation becomes extremely powerful. 

The spirit of collaborative innovation is the driving heartbeat of our work. We hope our passion, drive, and determination become contagious, inspiring everyone who reads this book to keep pushing forward to the edge.”

Setting up the Magic

Big shoutout to the team at SUSE for working so efficiently to make this Book Sprint come to life, especially to our main organizer Katerina Arzhayev, Director of Edge Operations and to our long-time Book Sprints author and champion Keith Basil! 

This Book Sprint is actually a testament to how Sprints can truly come from anywhere. We were doing a quick catch-up with Keith, which then led to a conversation about a potential book SUSE might want to write. From there, the SUSE team moved efficiently to set everything up over the course of just three months. The Book Sprints team worked closely with SUSE for a very thorough set-up, including a call with the authors prior to the Sprint to prepare them for it. It was also exciting to learn about the promotional plans each team had for the book, as well as SUSE’s many ideas for other uses of the Sprint output, including white papers and presentations other than simply the book. It was inspiring to see the creativity and collaborative spirit present well before the Sprint even started!   

Running the Sprint

The Sprint opened the morning of Day 1 with a motivating message from Keith, empowering the team to push through the rigorous five days ahead. As an old hand at Book Sprinting, Keith was deeply familiar with the process and experience. Jana, our Book Sprints facilitator, admired the passion and commitment to producing something meaningful that Keith was able to share with the other participants. 

Jana Mendelski (left) and Keith Basil (right), Book Sprints facilitator and SUSE VP and General Manager respectively, address the authors on Day 1 to motivate and empower them for the week ahead.

The authors had an ambitious project for this Sprint, creating a huge wall of post-its from Day 1 and identifying many areas they wanted to write about. Jana pushed them to accomplish their goals realistically, keeping them on-schedule while at the same time encouraging prioritization of areas should they not be able to cover everything. With nearly 12-hour long days of discussion, writing, reading, and editing, the authors were able to accomplish nearly all their topics in the outline in five days. 

The authors getting started on their massive wall of post-its on Day 1!

Jana shared that she was very happy with the results of the Sprint, applauding the experts on being strong writers. They were able to balance the big-picture approach to writing about Edge as a concept and the technical details that examples and real-life applications sometimes called for. Several of the authors also shared their satisfaction with the process and its benefits to the team. “When we all work together with diverse voices you get different viewpoints, and you get more distilled knowledge out to the public,” Ravan Naidoo, Solutions Engineer (Observability) shared. “It’s about empowerment.” Mark Abrams also shared, “We’re going to get a book out of it, but we’re also getting really strong alignment from different parts of the organization […] This is an amazing experience and a really great group of people to come together and make it happen.” 

Experimenting with new technology

We are also thrilled that SUSE agreed to partner with us in testing out our new AI-powered technology Ketty in some parts of the Book Sprint, allowing us to use this Book Sprint to test it out. Ketty allows authors to submit a knowledge base from which an AI can reference in answering questions or prompts from the authors. 

The results of the AI test during this Sprint were incredibly helpful in developing a clearer understanding of the potential usefulness and pitfalls of such a tool in our Sprints. Big shoutout to the authors and SUSE for being such cooperative and collaborative partners in this! 

The authors pose for a wacky group photo after five days of hard work — and the results to show for it!

Keep an eye out for more Sprint updates in the future! Never miss an update with us by following us at the links below. 

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