KubeFM

Forced platform migrations are usually treated as something to survive. At Scout24, a mandatory OS migration became an opportunity to rethink Kubernetes autoscaling, node provisioning, and infrastructure efficiency. John Ford explains how Scout24 moved its EKS-based Infinity platform from a polling autoscaler and over-provisioned capacity to Karpenter and Bottlerocket . The result was faster node...

Most teams scale Kubernetes by thinking about pods and nodes. At Render, Brian Stack ran into a different dimension: hundreds of thousands of namespaces per cluster, multiplied across DaemonSets that list-watch every namespace. Brian explains how Render traced the issue through Calico and Vector, worked with upstream maintainers, and turned memory profiling into operational wins: lower node costs,...

What happens when an AI agent stops generating Kubernetes YAML and starts operating the cluster directly? Mike Solomon , software engineer at AIATELLA, explains how his team moved from a sprawling Helm setup to Markdown-driven infrastructure specs that Claude Code can execute, test, and refine. You will learn Why Helm became hard to maintain for a fast-moving medical infrastructure repo How Claude...

A single Kubernetes CRD for every service request turns small changes into full-platform reconciliations. Alexander Held , former platform engineer at Mercedes-Benz Tech Innovation, describes a production refactor from a 2,000-line CRD to purpose-built resources and controllers. He shows how teams can model business workflows as Kubernetes APIs and then use owner references , finalizers , and even...

Kelsey Hightower , Eric Abercrombie , and Julius Payne II reflect on life after achievement, entering the Kubernetes world for the first time, and how music, creativity, and lived experience shape the way they think about technology. In this interview: Why fundamentals , patience, and repetition still matter more than shortcuts How Kubernetes , community, and confidence intersect for people enteri...

You're running gRPC services in Kubernetes, load balancing looks fine on the dashboard — but some pods are burning at 80% CPU while others sit idle, and adding more replicas only partially helps. Rohit Agrawal , a Staff Software Engineer on the traffic platform team at Databricks, explains why this happens and how his team replaced Kubernetes's default networking with a proxy-less, client-side loa...

You're integrating HashiCorp Vault into your Kubernetes cluster and adding a temporary debug log line to check whether the ServiceAccount token is being passed correctly. Three months later, that log line is still in production — and the token it prints has a 1-year expiry with no audience restrictions. Vincent von Büren , a platform engineer at ipt in Switzerland, lived through exactly this incid...

Running GPU workloads on Kubernetes sounds straightforward until you need to isolate multiple tenants on the same server. The moment you virtualize GPUs for security, you lose access to NVIDIA kernel drivers — and almost every tool in the ecosystem assumes those drivers exist. Landon Clipp built a GPU-based Containers as a Service platform from scratch, solving each isolation layer — from kernel s...

Build failures in Kubernetes CI/CD pipelines are a silent productivity killer. Developers spend 45+ minutes scrolling through cryptic logs, often just hitting rerun and hoping for the best. Ron Matsliah , DevOps engineer at Next Insurance , built an AI-powered assistant that cut build debugging time by 75% — not as a dashboard, but delivered directly in Slack where developers already work. In this...

Managed Kubernetes on a major cloud provider can cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars a month — and much of that spending hides behind defaults, minimum resource ratios, and auxiliary services you didn't ask for. Fernando Duran , founder of SadServers, shares how his GKE Autopilot proof of concept ran close to $1,000/month on a fraction of the CPU of the actual workload and how he cut that t...

Running multiple Kubernetes clusters on AWS with the cluster autoscaler? Every four months, you face the same grind: upgrading Kubernetes versions, recreating auto scaling groups, and hoping instance type changes stick. Adhi Sutandi , DevOps Engineer at Beekeeper by LumApps, shares how his team migrated from the cluster autoscaler to Karpenter across eight EKS clusters — and the hard lessons they...

Migrating from ECS to Kubernetes sounds straightforward — until you hit spot capacity failures, firewall rules silently dropping traffic, and memory metrics that lie to your autoscaler. Radosław Miernik , Head of Engineering at aleno, walks through a real production migration: what broke, what they missed, and the fixes that made it work. In this interview: Running Flux and Argo CD together — Flux...

Kubernetes nodes on EKS can take over a minute to become ready, and pods often wait even longer — but most teams never look into why. Jan Ludvik , Senior Staff Reliability Engineer at Outreach, shares how he cut node startup from 65 to 45 seconds and reduced P90 pod startup by 30 seconds across ~1,000 nodes — by tackling overlooked defaults and EBS bottlenecks. In this episode: Why Kubelet's seria...

You self-host services at home, but upgrades break things, rollbacks require SSH-ing in to kill containers manually, and there's no safety net if your hardware fails. Thibault Martin , Director of Program Development at the Matrix Foundation, walked this exact path — from Docker Compose to Podman with Ansible to Kubernetes on a single server — and explains why each transition happened and what it...

Your database backup strategy shouldn't be the thing that takes your production systems down. Ziv Yatzik manages 600+ Postgres clusters in a closed network environment with no public cloud. After existing backup solutions proved unreliable — causing downtime when disks filled up — his team built a new architecture using pgBackRest , Argo CD , and Kubernetes CronJobs . In this episode: Why storing...

Most developers assume Kubernetes requires an enterprise budget. Varnit Goyal proves otherwise — he built a full three-node Kubernetes cluster for $2.16/month using Rackspace Spot Instances. The trick: pick non-default instance types , distribute nodes across low-demand regions , and let Kubernetes handle rescheduling when nodes get preempted. For service exposure, he replaced the $10/month load b...

Dilshan Wijesooriya, Senior Cloud Engineer, discusses a real incident where migrating EKS nodes to AL2023 caused the cluster autoscaler to lose AWS permissions silently. You will learn: Why AL2023 blocks pod access to instance metadata by default , breaking components that relied on node IAM roles (like cluster autoscaler, external-DNS, and AWS Load Balancer Controller) How to implement IRSA corre...

Fabián Sellés Rosa, Tech Lead of the Runtime team at Adevinta, walks through a real engineering investigation that started with a simple request: allowing tenants to use third-party Kafka services. What seemed straightforward turned into a complex DNS resolution problem that required testing seven different approaches before a working solution was found. You will learn: Why Kafka's multi-step DNS...

Amos Wenger walks through his production incident where adding a home computer as a Kubernetes node caused TLS certificate renewals to fail. The discussion covers debugging techniques using tools like netshoot and K9s , and explores the unexpected interactions between Kubernetes overlay networks and consumer routers. You will learn: How Kubernetes networking assumptions break when mixing cloud VMs...

Tanat Lokejaroenlarb shares the complete journey of replacing EKS Managed Node Groups and Cluster Autoscaler with AWS Karpenter . He explains how this migration transformed their Kubernetes operations, from eliminating brittle upgrade processes to achieving significant cost savings of €30,000 per month through automated instance selection and AMD adoption . You will learn: How to decouple control...

Festus Owumi walks through his project of building a lightweight version of Kubernetes in Go. He removed etcd (replacing it with in-memory storage), skipped containers entirely, dropped authentication, and focused purely on the control plane mechanics. Through this process, he demonstrates how the reconciliation loop, API server concurrency handling, and scheduling logic actually work at their mos...

Understanding what's actually happening inside a complex Kubernetes system is one of the biggest challenges architects face. Oleksii Kolodiazhnyi , Senior Architect at Mirantis , shares his structured approach to Kubernetes workload assessment . He breaks down how to move from high-level business understanding to detailed technical analysis, using visualization tools and systematic documentation....

Andrew Jeffree from SafetyCulture walks through their complete migration of 250+ microservices from a fragile Helm-based setup to GitOps with ArgoCD , all without any downtime. He explains how they replaced YAML configurations with a domain-specific language built in CUE , creating a better developer experience while adding stronger validation and reducing operational pain points. You will learn:...

Mai Nishitani , Director of Enterprise Architecture at NTT Data and AWS Community Builder , demonstrates how Model Context Protocol (MCP) enables Claude to directly interact with Kubernetes clusters through natural language commands. You will learn: How MCP servers work and why they're significant for standardizing AI integration with DevOps tools, moving beyond custom integrations to a universal...

In this closing episode, Bryan Ross (Field CTO at GitLab), Jane Yan (Principal Program Manager at Microsoft), Sean O’Meara (CTO at Mirantis) and William Rizzo (Strategy Lead, CTO Office at Mirantis) discuss how GitOps evolves in practice. How enterprises are embedding Flux into developer platforms and managed cloud services. Why bridging CI/CD and infrastructure remains a core challenge—and how Gi...