Yolanda C. is a DevOps engineer and platform educator with eleven years of experience in container orchestration, continuous integration and delivery, and cloud-native infrastructure. She holds all three CNCF Kubernetes certifications — CKA, CKAD, and CKS — as well as AWS Certified DevOps Engineer Professional, and has worked as a platform engineering lead at a SaaS company where she owned the Kubernetes control plane for a multi-tenant production environment serving millions of users.
Yolanda’s career path ran through application development before it reached infrastructure. She spent three years as a backend developer, which means she approaches platform engineering from the perspective of someone who has actually been frustrated by a poorly documented deployment pipeline at two in the morning. That experience shapes how she explains Kubernetes to both developers and operations engineers: she teaches the control plane and the workload simultaneously, because in practice neither side can ignore the other.
At Boost eLearning, Yolanda teaches the complete Kubernetes certification track. She builds every course around the CNCF exams’ performance-based format — students work in live Kubernetes clusters, not slideshow diagrams, from the first session. Boost’s Live Lab environment gives learners persistent cluster access where they deploy, debug, and secure real workloads: multi-container pod design, persistent volume provisioning, RBAC policy authoring, network policy enforcement, and admission controller configuration for the CKS security track.
Her DevOps curriculum covers CI/CD pipeline design, infrastructure-as-code with Terraform, and GitOps patterns using Flux and ArgoCD. She is explicit with students about the difference between tool familiarity and operational judgment — knowing how to run a Helm upgrade is not the same as understanding when not to. Labs are designed to surface that distinction by presenting scenarios where the obvious action is the wrong one.
Yolanda uses Boost’s retention system to keep Kubernetes API object syntax and kubectl patterns fresh between live sessions, because the CKA and CKAD exams reward candidates who can write YAML under time pressure without consulting documentation. Her post-session review sets are calibrated specifically to the kubectl commands and manifest structures that exam candidates most often blank on.
She is active in the CNCF community, contributes to open-source tooling documentation, and mentors engineers transitioning from traditional ops backgrounds into cloud-native roles.