Kubernetes for Humans

In this episode of the Kubernetes for Humans podcast, Philipp shares his incredible 10-year journey at Elastic, witnessing the company's massive growth from 300 to 4,000 employees. Discover the fascinating origin story of how Elastic evolved from a simple recipe search project into a global powerhouse for observability, security, and vector databases. Philipp dives into the complex realities of op...

In this episode of the Kubernetes for Humans podcast, tech veteran Dave Aronchick shares his incredible journey from leading the Kubernetes and GKE projects at Google to co-founding Kubeflow and his current venture, Expanso. Dave takes us back to the foundational days of Kubernetes, revealing how Google navigated the open-source landscape to establish it as an industry standard without relying on...

In this episode, special guest Blake Sherwood joins the show to discuss his unique career trajectory from tourism and coal mining to leading massive-scale Kubernetes migrations. Blake shares insights from his experience managing petabytes of data in high-compliance environments, delving into the practical realities of integrating AI into enterprise workflows and observability systems. The conversa...

In this episode of "Kubernetes for Humans," Stefana Muller, VP of Infrastructure & Operations at Salesforce, shares her fascinating journey from technical support to navigating the massive scale of the Own Backup acquisition. Stefana dives into the immense multi-cloud Kubernetes challenges of scaling from 18,000 to over 52,000 clusters, standardizing environments across AWS and Azure, and leve...

In this episode of the Kubernetes for Humans podcast, Itiel sits down with the internet's favorite cloud contrarian, Corey Quinn of the Duckbill Group.   Corey shares his unconventional career path as a "cautionary tale," explaining why his knack for fixing horrifying AWS bills makes him a terrible employee, and why he absolutely refuses to touch Kubernetes in production.   Tune in for a hilarious...

Have you ever considered making a massive career pivot after two decades in the exact same field? In this episode, Itiel sits down with Dan Hicks , a Platform Engineer at Boomi, to explore his fascinating transition from a 20-year career as an enterprise Java developer to the fast-paced, ever-evolving world of Kubernetes and infrastructure. Dan breaks down the fundamental similarities and stark di...

In this episode of the Kubernetes for Humans podcast, we are joined by infrastructure and FinOps expert Josh Schlanger. Drawing on over 15 years of experience across Martech, e-commerce, and health tech, Josh shares why solving core business problems should always take priority over chasing new, "shiny object" technologies. The conversation dives deep into the evolution of cloud spending, explorin...

This episode features Matt Butcher , CEO of Fermyon and creator of Helm, and  Ari Weil  from Akamai, as they discuss the evolution of the cloud-native ecosystem. They share their professional origins, highlighting how Kubernetes transitioned from a complex tool for experts to a foundational technology for global enterprises. Part of the conversation focuses on the history of Helm, explaining its g...

In this episode, Itiel joins forces with Shemer, Director of Platform Solutions at the gaming giant Playtika, and Scott Rosenberg, Lead Architect at TeraSky, to discuss the realities of platform engineering at a massive scale. The trio dissects Playtika’s multi-year journey from a legacy, homegrown Kubespray infrastructure to a modern, holistic platform built on Spectro Cloud, all while running st...

From the early days of "neural nets" and WebSphere to the modern complexities of Kubernetes, Hayato Shimizu has seen the evolution of infrastructure firsthand. In this episode of Kubernetes for Humans, the co-founder of Digitalis joins the show to discuss the harsh realities of enterprise platform engineering and his personal journey from corporate employee to consultancy owner. Hayato recounts hi...

In this episode Itiel hosts Veeam experts Julia and Michael, to share their distinct paths into cloud-native technology. Julia discusses her transition from a background in law and marketing to becoming a CNCF ambassador and AWS container hero. Michael, a veteran who has been with Veeam for over 10 years, details his traditional CIS admin background (virtualization, storage) and the evolution of t...

In this episode, Itiel Shwartz kicks off a series on MLOps, LLM, and GenAI in Kubernetes.  Starting with Alexei Ledenev, who has over two decades in software development and deep experience in cloud architecture and distributed systems. He shares his journey from CoreOS Fleet to his current role on the Platform Team at Doit. The conversation focuses on tackling the complexity of Kubernetes, which...

Meet Idan Gazit from GitHub Next, a team responsible for projects like GitHub Copilot. Gazit, despite jokingly claiming to be "the least knowledgeable about Kubernetes," shares his diverse career journey, spanning from early web development with Perl and Django to his time at Heroku and eventually GitHub. He discusses his team's role in prototyping future software development solutions, emphasizin...

Meet Dustin Kirkland, VP of Engineering at Chainguard. Dustin shares his fascinating 26-year journey in the tech industry, from IBM and two stints at Canonical to roles at Google (working on GKE), Apex, and Goldman Sachs, eventually leading him back to engineering at Chainguard. Discover how Chainguard is helping secure the software supply chain, focusing on building secure containers primarily fo...

In this episode, Itiel has an insightful conversation with Dr. David Morrison, a research scientist and founder specializing in Kubernetes scheduling and autoscaling. David shares his journey from operations research to leading distributed systems efforts at tech giants like Yelp and Airbnb. Learn about the transition from Apache Mesos to Kubernetes at Yelp, including the role of their open-source...

Join Itiel as he chats with Gianluca Mardente, a Principal Engineer at Cisco Systems. Gianluca shares his path to tech and Kubernetes, including his work history and the inspiration behind his open-source project, Sveltos. They dive into the significant challenges of managing a large fleet of Kubernetes clusters – ensuring consistency, handling upgrades, and coordinating resources across different...

Join us as Hasith Kalpag, Head of Platform Engineering at Outshift by Cisco, shares his fascinating journey. Hear about his experience leading the massive WebEx transformation to cloud-native using Kubernetes, including the intense push during the COVID-19 response, where they went from zero to over 50 production clusters in just three months. Learn about the challenges and lessons learned from mi...

In this episode, Sid, CEO of Hathora, discusses building game infrastructure, specifically for hosting dedicated servers. He shares how Hathora tackles the challenges of running stateful, low-latency, high-throughput workloads that reconcile player actions up to 60 times per second. Sid explains their approach using Kubernetes to manage compute across bare metal and cloud VMs, leveraging technolog...

Live from KubeCon London, this episode of Kubernetes for Humans features Maxime Veroone, Staff Engineer at Decathlon's e-commerce division, sharing the company’s cloud-native transformation story. From their early days running a container platform with Rancher 1 to their strategic move to Kubernetes, Decathlon has embraced modern infrastructure to enable scalability and resilience. But with over 5...

In this special KubeCon edition episode of the Kubernetes for Humans podcast, Itiel meets with Lukas Gentele, CEO and co-founder of Loft Labs. Discover why Lukas believes multi-tenancy is a major obstacle in Kubernetes adoption and how Loft Labs is tackling this challenge through innovative projects like vCluster, a "super famous project" for running virtual Kubernetes clusters. Learn about the jo...

In this special KubeCon episode, Itiel sits down with Jono Bacon of CNCF fame to talk about his career in building developer and user engagement for open-source technologies. Jono shared his early experiences with Linux and how it sparked a passion for community building. They discuss their current coaching company, Stateshift, which helps various tech companies, including those in the CNCF ecosys...

In this episode, Itiel sits down with Kasper, a Developer Advocate at Dash0. Kasper discusses his background, including his extensive experience building platforms on Kubernetes at Lunar, a Nordic challenger bank. He shares insights into the challenges and successes of using cutting-edge cloud-native technologies in a regulated banking environment. Kasper also touches upon his involvement in the C...

Ricardo from CERN, who leads the platform infrastructure teams, discusses CERN's significant role in particle physics research with the Large Hadron Collider. The conversation covers how CERN manages the massive amounts of data generated from experiments using a worldwide computing grid. Ricardo shares CERN's journey with adopting Kubernetes for various applications, including critical systems con...

In this episode of Kubernetes for Humans, we speak with Ahmed Bebars, a Principal Engineer at the New York Times and a CNCF Ambassador, who offers a unique perspective on cloud native technologies. Ahmed recounts his professional journey in accounting before transitioning into the technology sector, leading to his current deep involvement with the Kubernetes ecosystem. He shares his initial introd...

Adam Jacob, CEO of System Initiative and original author of Chef, discusses the evolution of infrastructure automation and his career-long passion for infrastructure. Adam reflects on the history and context of Chef, its emergence alongside EC2, and its role in configuration management. He shares insights into the competitive landscape of configuration management tools like Chef, Puppet, and Ansib...