Whitney Lee is a well-known figure in cloud computing. She is an international keynote speaker, a podcast host, the host of several successful streaming shows, and a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) Ambassador. But here’s the wild part: Whitney wrote her first line of code EVER when she was almost 40 years old, only 5 years ago.

The first half of this talk is about Whitney’s whirlwind journey from being a professional photographer to becoming a prominent figure in the cloud native community. In telling her story, Whitney touches on themes that almost anyone can relate to, including impostor syndrome, career-changing, feeling different from one’s peers, and needing to learn a lot of information quickly.

Then Whitney pivots and flexes her technical chops by telling the story of an anthromorphized application named Hero. Hero is a running application in a Kubernetes production environment who is currently endangering users, the system, and themselves because their cluster has no security!

Whitney discusses security-related system design choices such as secrets management; cluster-level and runtime policies; and securing pod-to-pod communications. She talks about why those security features are needed, and then she teaches about the CNCF tools that can do each system design choice, and what differentiates those tools from one another.

Whitney teaches these more complex cloud topics in a highly illustrative and fun way that is accessible (and enjoyable!) to beginners and experts alike.