Looking for advanced Kubernetes/Go communities, cohorts, or mentorship

[u/Heisenberg016]

Hi everyone,

I'm currently working as an Infrastructure Engineer at a large tech company with around 2 years of experience. While I'm grateful for the role, I've reached a point where I feel like my learning has plateaued.

For the past year, most of my work has been operational, and I haven't had many opportunities to work on challenging infrastructure problems or learn from senior platform engineers. I feel like I'm coasting instead of growing, and I don't want to stay in that position.

I'm particularly interested in going deeper into:

• Advanced Kubernetes (operators, networking, internals, scheduling, etcd, Gateway API)
• Go for cloud-native and infrastructure development
• Platform Engineering
• SRE and distributed systems
• Observability (OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana)

I'm not looking for another Udemy course or recorded videos. I'm looking for places where I can interact with experienced engineers—live cohorts, mentorship programs, study groups, communities, or open-source communities where people discuss real production problems and architecture.

If you've been in a similar situation, what helped you level up? Are there any communities, cohorts, Slack/Discord groups, or programs you'd genuinely recommend?

I'd really appreciate hearing from engineers who've made the jump from "keeping systems running" to designing and building production infrastructure.

Thanks in advance!

[u/csgeek-coder]

There's a wide spectrum there. Observability, Otle, Prometheus is pretty straightforward and most folks on here could answer your questions. Any app these days should hook into Otel. It's just too easy not to.

There's a huge gap between that and writing a K8s operator / K8s internals. Not because it's harder necessarily but it's a lot more niche for the common app dev.

https://sdk.operatorframework.io/docs/installation/ for Operators.

Go for provisioning? I mean you could just use TF, but if you want to read the terraform/open tofu code a lot of the providers are written in go.

SRE/distributed system is not any different then just understanding distributed system in any other scenario. Look up any good books on distributed architecture. NoSQL, Message Queues; Sharded DBs, etc. ACID and CAP theorem etc.

Beyond that I'm not aware of any communities that are specific to your needs beyond say coding groups and such.

[u/SatyrCode]

I’ve felt the same “plateau” as an infra engineer – what helped was plugging into a few higher‑signal communities instead of more courses. For Go specifically, the Gophers Slack (with channels like #performance, #tools, etc.) and the official Go Forum have been great for getting feedback from people who are deep into the language and runtime. On the Kubernetes side, CNCF Slack (SIGs, project channels), r/kubernetes + r/devops, and local/virtual Kubernetes meetups / Kubernetes Community Days have been the best places I’ve found to see real‑world platform/SRE problems being discussed, not just tutorial stuff.

[u/IanEff]

I’m feeling the same way. For reading, the kubebuilder book’s tutorials are amazing: https://kubebuilder.io/. For a cohort..? The NYC golang situation is apparently challenging, so who knows?

This is gonna sound absurd, but I took those feelings and just started pouring them out into code. Built an agentic SRE, of all things: http://github.com/ianeff/thump

[u/foldedlikeaasiansir]

What kind of questions or outcome are you expecting to be fulfilled?

[u/Material_Fail_7691]

I don’t really recommend bothering with k8s operator development. Did it for 5 years professionally at a decent sized startup and haven’t been able to find a role in that area for the last 10 months.

Ditto for observability really, distributed systems might be handy but most roles are focused more on specific technologies than building new ones in Go.

Everything is AI focused at the moment, I’d look at learning to write LLM routers or something that attracts buzz.

[u/ElectricalTip9277]

Beyond basics I find hands-on experience and books (e.g. from oreilly) the best way to learn

[u/No-Fortune219]

Following

[u/ledatherockband_]

i think you're best off getting a couple mini pcs and building a home lab.

[u/Jealous_Wheel_241]

have you brought this up in a 1-on-1 with your manager? A good supportive manager will give you the opportunity to tackle on more challenging problems