Kubernetes for Humans

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 differences between application development and platform engineering. He shares the unexpected hurdles he faced during his transition, from complex networking and CoreDNS latency to the harsh realities exposed by chaos testing in cloud environments. Also, get a unique look at how Dan leverages AI in his daily workflow. Discover how he uses tools like Claude, complete with voice control, to map out architectural visions and reduce toil, all while emphasizing that AI is a powerful assistant, not a replacement for human critical thinking. Finally, the episode wraps up with Dan's predictions for the future of Kubernetes, the game-changing impact of the Karpenter autoscaler, and how infrastructure must adapt to support specialized AI workloads and new chipsets.

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, exploring how the shift from data center CAPEX to cloud OPEX created a "Wild West" of unchecked spending that can severely impact SaaS margins. Josh discusses the expanding scope of FinOps, highlighting how the costs of data storage, observability tools, and newly adopted AI technologies (like LLM tokens and coding assistants) are rapidly catching up to traditional cloud spend. Tune in to hear Josh's insights on why R&D engineers must own cost optimization execution, why true Platform Engineering is about enabling developers rather than just rebranding sysadmins, and his practical, hands-on tips for identifying and eliminating cloud waste today. Follow Josh and CloudXray AI on Linkedin

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 growth from a simple hackathon project into a standard package manager. Another part takes on the future of distributed computing, specifically how Akamai is integrating infrastructure as a service to support modern workloads. Lastly, a prediction that the next major industry phase will involve the operationalization of AI, where SREs focus on managing intelligence at the edge rather than in centralized regions.

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 strictly on-premise to support 25+ games and high-volume traffic. The conversation focuses heavily on the art of abstraction, specifically how using tools like Crossplane allowed Playtika to modernize their backend without disrupting the developer experience - a philosophy Scott describes as taking the "long path" to ultimately achieve the "short path" of seamless adoption. Learn about the challenges of overcoming "people and culture" hurdles during migration, the concept of using Kubernetes as a control plane rather than just a runtime, and realistic predictions for the role of AI agents and RAG in future DevOps workflows. Follow Scott and Shemer on LinkedIn.

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 his career path starting in the late 1990s, highlighting how early application delivery methods at companies like Citrix served as precursors to modern containerization. He provides expert insights into the challenges of Kubernetes migration, emphasizing the transition from traditional, stateful systems to scalable, cloud-native architectures. The conversation explores the complexities of day-two operations, such as managing unpredictable traffic loads and prioritizing production firefighting over development backlogs. Finally, he touches upon the future of the industry, specifically how AI-driven root cause analysis can streamline incident resolution in high-pressure enterprise environments. Follow Hayato on LinkedIn, and check out Digitalis & AxonOps to learn more about his work in the DevOps ecosystem.

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 this role into platform engineering. We explore the critical need for backup and data resilience, which is often the last thing companies consider in cloud-native application deployment. The discussion covers why backup serves as the essential insurance policy against modern threats like ransomware, emphasizing the importance of application consistency and data portability across multiple platforms, including Kubernetes, SaaS, and public cloud services.

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 Alexei notes can be overwhelming even for experienced DevOps engineers. He discusses how he developed the idea to leverage AI assistants and the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to access and execute tools like kubectl. This concept creates a "translator between AI and the Kubernetes environment", allowing users to troubleshoot complex cluster issues or quickly create ad hoc testing environments using natural language. They also explore the challenges of implementation, such as hallucination, and how providing context helps the AI self-correct. Looking ahead, Alexei predicts that infrastructure is moving towards self-aware and self-healing platforms that integrate AI deeply.

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, emphasizing the importance of identifying and nurturing risky, impactful ideas for developers, even if it means "killing projects" that don't gain traction. Gazit also provides insights into GitHub's evolving focus on AI to enhance developer experiences and envisions a future where software creation becomes more accessible to a broader audience, with professional developers empowered by advanced tools, fostering a more integrated approach to the entire software development lifecycle. Connect with Idan on social: https://gazit.me/

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 for Kubernetes. Learn about the critical problem of software vulnerabilities (CVEs) and how Chainguard's products, including their hardened container images with a zero CVE goal and accelerated patching SLAs, address this challenge. Dustin also introduces their newer initiatives, like Chainguard Libraries, which secures open source dependencies and builds hardened virtual machines (kernels) for Kubernetes worker nodes. He explains Chainguard's automation-driven approach, which allows them to monitor upstream fixes and rapidly rebuild and retest images and libraries.

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 API layer, Pasta. Discover why David started his own venture, Applied Computing Research Labs, to help companies tackle the challenges of Kubernetes cost optimization and reliability. Get an inside look at SimCube, his fascinating project that simulates production Kubernetes clusters for debugging, troubleshooting, and capacity planning. David also offers insights into the common pitfalls of low cluster utilization, the complexities of saving costs beyond low-hanging fruit, and the potential future of distributed systems.

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 clusters. Learn how Gianluca's project tackles these 'Day-2 Operations', offering solutions that go beyond simple cluster creation and enable seamless integration of various open-source tools like Crossplane. Check out Sveltos: https://projectsveltos.github.io/sveltos/

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 migrating a large enterprise product, like navigating aggressive timelines and overcoming unexpected issues. Hasith also discusses his current role at Outshift, Cisco's incubation engine focused on innovating new ventures, and how they are building a common foundation for diverse teams. Discover his vision for the future of platform engineering, highlighting the critical role of AI in managing complexity and enabling self-service, including Outshift's internal "Jarvis" project focused on agentic platform engineering. Learn more about the AGNTCY initiative: https://agntcy.org/

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 technologies like Talos and Civo's Omni. He also details the technical hurdles they face with Kubernetes networking (like hostport issues), achieving sub-3-second pod startup times, and optimizing container image pulls, offering insights into the unique demands of the gaming industry and Hathora's growth. Sid is the CEO and co-founder of Hathora, the premier tool for studios to globally scale dedicated servers for their multiplayer video games. Sid comes from a deeply technical background, having led infra teams responsible for $100m+ annual cloud budgets. His team at Hathora is working with some of the most anticipated games of '25 and beyond, including Frost Giant’s Stormgate, Omeda’s Predecessor, and 1047 Games’ Splitgate 2. Follow Sid on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dsiddharth/ Learn more about Hathora at hathora.dev

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 5,000 digital team members, Kubernetes introduced a new challenge: developer experience. As engineers were increasingly expected to navigate complex YAML configurations and act as operators, the need for simplification became critical. Maxime discusses how his role focuses on bridging the gap between platform and application teams, working to abstract Kubernetes complexity without locking developers into rigid workflows. His approach is rooted in empathy, actively listening to developers and shaping solutions around their needs. The conversation also dives into Decathlon’s infrastructure practices using Terraform and CI/CD pipelines, and Maxim’s enthusiasm for tools like Flagger and Flux, which are helping ensure safe, progressive deployments in their high-stakes e-commerce environment.

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 journey that led to vCluster's creation, stemming from the challenges of running a multi-tenant PaaS offering. Lukas also shares insights into the adoption of vCluster, including surprising stories of users running thousands of virtual clusters. The episode further explores Loft Labs' philosophy on balancing open source and commercial offerings. The highlight? The announcement of vNode, a brand new commercial product for virtualizing nodes and achieving node-level security to separate vClusters even further. Understand the limitations of existing solutions like micro-VMs and GVisor and how VNode offers a lightweight alternative using Linux kernel magic. Finally, Lukas shares his prediction on the future of virtualization, suggesting a shift away from traditional VMs towards lighter-weight solutions like VNode. Check out Loft Labs: https://www.loft.sh/ Learn more about vNode: https://www.vnode.com/

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 ecosystem, improve their community outreach, brand building, and user adoption. Examples of successful community building, like GitLab and Dagger, are mentioned. Jono concludes with advice on how companies can stand out at events and in their broader engagement strategies by being unique and fostering genuine interactions.

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 CNCF community as an ambassador and co-chair for KubeCon. The discussion explores Lunar's philosophy of leveraging open-source projects and their journey of adopting Kubernetes and other cloud-native tools. Kasper also explains his move to Dash0, emphasizing his passion for observability and the potential of Open Telemetry.

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 controlling detectors and accelerators. He also touches upon CERN's involvement with the CNCF and the Kubernetes community. The discussion includes their strategy for managing large-scale deployments and their perspective on the future of Kubernetes in scientific computing, including the potential impact of GenAI and specialized hardware.

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 introduction to Kubernetes almost a decade ago, recognizing its capabilities in container orchestration. Ahmed provided his insights on the appropriate use cases for Kubernetes, emphasizing the importance of identifying the problem before selecting a solution. The discussion also covers service mesh technologies such as Istio, along with Ahmed's perspective on their complexities and benefits. Looking ahead, he shares his thoughts on the evolution of the Kubernetes ecosystem, including the potential impact of GenAI. Follow Ahmed on Linkedin and Youtube Don't miss Ahmed's upcoming KubeCon talk!

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 Ansible, and touches upon the transition of Chef to Progress. Adam also introduces System Initiative, explaining its ambitious goal to revolutionize infrastructure automation by building digital twins of digital things, moving away from treating infrastructure as code. He also predicts more attempts to rethink infrastructure automation and encourages "wild swings" to improve upon the status quo. ** Follow Adam on Linkedin, X, and BlueSky. ** Check out System Initiative: https://www.systeminit.com/

This episode of "Kubernetes for Humans" features Dan Ciruli, a Senior Director of Product Management at Nutanix, who shares his journey in tech and his perspective on the evolution of cloud-native technologies. Ciruli discusses his early career as an engineer and his transition to product management, noting that the role was not well-defined in the 1990s. He recounts his experiences with startups, Google, and D2IQ (formerly Mesosphere), highlighting the rise of Docker and projects like Mesos. He emphasizes that the creation of the CNCF and support from major tech companies were key factors in Kubernetes becoming the dominant platform, stating "the CNCF was really the genius". Ciruli also explains that D2IQ pivoted to Kubernetes to focus on making it more usable for enterprises. Ciruli discusses Nutanix's acquisition of D2IQ to enhance their container management offerings. He explains that Nutanix, founded by ex-Google engineers, sought to expand beyond VMs and needed a "good container story". According to a survey he references, 92% of companies running Kubernetes in production do not want developers managing infrastructure, and 86% of companies want to run VMs and containers on the same infrastructure. Ciruli predicts that the Kubernetes API will be the future, with various implementations and that the ultimate success for Kubernetes will be when the specific implementation does not matter. He believes the API will enable declarative deployment of applications across different environments, and notes that "the API will have lots of different implementations, but that will be that declarative deployment of applications".

This podcast features Cory O'Daniel, CEO of Massdriver, an infrastructure automation platform. O'Daniel discusses his extensive background in software engineering and cloud operations, highlighting his expertise in Erlang and Elixir programming languages and their applications within Kubernetes. He explains Massdriver's role in simplifying infrastructure management for both developers and operations engineers by visually representing infrastructure-as-code. The conversation also touches upon comparisons with other similar platforms like Backstage and Crossplane, emphasizing the need for tailored solutions based on organizational needs and maturity levels. Finally, O'Daniel shares his perspective on future industry trends, predicting a shift towards simpler systems while expressing concern regarding potential security vulnerabilities. Check out Massdriver's free trial and follow Cory on Linkedin. Until we come full circle on Cory's podcast be sure to give it a listen as well: https://www.platformengineeringpod.com/

Mirko, co-founder and former CEO of Instana, led the Application Performance Management company for microservices to its successful acquisition by IBM in late 2020. In May 2023, he co-founded Dash0, an OpenTelemetry-native observability solution, furthering his contributions to the observability field. An active angel investor, Mirko supports over 60 tech startups, showcasing his dedication to fostering innovation and emerging technologies. Follow Mirko on Linkedin and X.

Solomon Hykes began his career as a System Administrator at Fairgame in 1999 and later worked as a Junior Software Engineer at the San Diego Supercomputer Center in 2002. In 2003, he became self-employed and worked as a Tech Mentor & Instructor until 2004. Solomon then joined CEIS as a Trusted Infrastructure Engineer from 2004 to 2006. Solomon Hykes then joined SmartJog as a Solutions Engineer from 2006 to 2007. In 2007, he co-founded Docker, previously known as Dotcloud, and served as the CEO until 2013. During this time, thheey developed DotCloud into a successful second-generation platform-as-a-service. Solomon then became the CTO of Docker from 2013 to 2018. In 2019, Solomon Hykes co-founded Dagger. Learn more about Dagger.io on Discord: https://discord.gg/dagger-io

Daniel Bryant is the Head of Product Marketing at Syntasso. His technical expertise focuses on ‘DevOps’ tooling, cloud/container platforms, and microservice implementations. Daniel is a long-time coder, platform engineer, and Java Champion, contributing to several open-source projects. He also writes for InfoQ, O’Reilly, and The New Stack and regularly presents at international conferences such as KubeCon, QCon, and JavaOne. In his copious free time, he enjoys running, reading, and traveling.

Ellen is a Partner at boldstart. She joined the boldstart team in January 2021, after having worked with the team as a founder at Dark. Her role allows her to do exactly what she loves – investing and supporting founders building pre-product, dev-focused, enterprise companies. Prior to boldstart and founding Dark, she worked in a variety of early stage product roles: at Lola on travel tooling, at Kickstarter on backer-facing projects, and at Microsoft on the first versions of cross-platform Office Mobile. The common thread is building tools that enable people to do creative work. Ellen has an a M.B.A from Harvard Business School, and a B.S in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering. She grew up in Rochester Hills, MI, but now lives in Somerville, MA with her husband and her cat, Gutenberg.

Wait, people run Kubernetes on mainframes? Yes, they do! Check out Elizabeth's 2019 KubeCon talk on the matter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rgyb_9zCaeA Elizabeth K. Joseph After spending a decade doing Linux systems administration, today Elizabeth K. Joseph works as a developer advocate at IBM focused on IBM Z. As a systems administrator, she worked for a small services provider in Philadelphia before joining HPE where she worked for four years on the geographically distributed OpenStack Infrastructure team. This team runs the fully open source infrastructure for OpenStack development and lead to an interest in other open source projects that have opened up their infrastructures. While working on OpenStack she wrote the book Common OpenStack Deployments. She is a former member of the Ubuntu Community Council and the co-author of the 8th and 9th editions of The Official Ubuntu Book. At home, she serves on Board of Directors for Partimus.org, a non-profit in the San Francisco Bay Area providing Linux-based computers to schools and education-focused community centers in need. Holger Wolf Holger started his career as a software engineer at Hewlett Packard (HP) and then spent nearly 3 decades (!) working for IBM. Currently, he's e2e responsible for OpenShift on the IBM Z and LinuxONE platforms. Working closely with RedHat on getting OpenShift versions out and on new enhancements and functions. Prior to that, Holger was responsible for System Tests of Linux Distributions on IBM zSystems and LinuxONE Platforms. Worked with Partners SUSE and RedHat to get their Enterprise Distributions on the IBM Platform. Led the test teams in Russia and the USA, with technical ownership of the test setup as well as driving test automation. He started to take ownership of OpenShift on IBM zSystems (now IBM Z) and LinuxONE. Setting up the effort for getting OpenShift on the Platform and interlocking with RedHat.

Chris is an IBM Distinguished Engineer and CTO for Instana, leading the technical strategy and development of Observability and IT Automation solutions at IBM. He is a recognized technology leader across programming languages, runtimes, platforms, observability, and automated IT operations. He has pioneered projects that fundamentally enhanced open-source communities and cloud-native platforms. He is currently focused on providing comprehensive real-time observability across the entire enterprise from Business to IT, and leveraging AI and Automation capabilities to enable organizations and teams to meet their operational objectives. Follow him on Linkedin and X

Ben Sigelman is the General Manager of ServiceNow Cloud Observability, which solves for the reliability and performance of cloud and cloud-native applications while broadening the scope and leverage of the broader Now Platform. Previously, he co-founded and was CEO of Lightstep, which ServiceNow acquired in 2021, and co-created both the OpenTracing and OpenTelemetry projects. Ben also helped define modern observability with his work on tracing and metrics monitoring at Google (the Monarch and Dapper projects) and was a pioneer in SRE best practices and tooling. He holds dual Bachelor of Science degrees in Mathematics and Computer Science from Brown University.

BJ Badyk is a human who desires an easier life. Nerd from birth, his curiosity led him down a path through the start of ISPs, Silicon Valley during the dot-com bubble, the last few years of the Playboy brand, and into the world of Adtech. He currently runs the platform engineering team at Nexxen, where they work on unique ways of handling millions of requests per second with Kubernetes. The team was an early adopter of Talos Linux, which they now run at scale. He presented at TalosCon 2023 and continues to pursue simple solutions to complex problems. In his free time, he can be found listening to synth-wave, motorcycling, or roaming around the woods with his ham radios. ------------ TalosCon 2023: https://youtu.be/WpE1EyB3fSE Nexxen: https://nexxen.com Find BJ @ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bjbadyk YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/transmissions

Ashan Senevirathne is an experienced Product Owner and Senior DevOps Engineer with a proven track record in driving innovation and efficiency in telecommunications. Currently with Swisscom, leading the development of a cloud-native orchestration framework for 5G Core using Kubernetes. Adept at optimizing release engineering processes, championing CI/CD workflows, and fostering cross-functional collaboration. Recognized for his expertise in Kubernetes, GitOps, cloud-native principles, and network orchestration. Joel Studler is a DevOps Engineer who currently works in a team that builds the cloud native 5G core at Swisscom. He is experienced in infrastructure automation, software-defined networking, and highly available databases. He is CK* certified and has written several CRD/Operator-based Kubernetes extensions. He is passionate about automation and user experience to make everyday life easier. Outside the tech sphere, he is an active musician both live and in the studio. Ashan & Joel's talk at KubeCon EU 2024: How We Are Moving from GitOps to Kubernetes Resource Model in 5G Core is now available on Youtube: https://youtu.be/crmTnB6Zwt8?si=I7QofgXQpc5n40y0

A long-time open-source programmer and entrepreneur, Gabriele has a degree in Statistics from the University of Florence. After having consistently contributed to the growth of 2ndQuadrant and its members through nurturing a lean and DevOps culture, he is now leading the Cloud Native initiative at EDB. Gabriele lives in Prato, a small but vibrant city located in the northern part of Tuscany, Italy - famous for having hosted the first European PostgreSQL conferences. His second home is Melbourne, Australia, where he studied at Monash University and worked in the ICT sector. He loves playing the Blues with his Fender Stratocaster, but his major passions are called Elisabeth and Charlotte! Follow Gabriele on Twitter and Linkedin

Special KubeCon EU 2024 Episode! ---- Liz Rice is Chief Open Source Officer with eBPF specialists Isovalent, creators of the Cilium cloud native networking, security, and observability project (recently acquired by Cisco). She was Chair of CNCF's Technical Oversight Committee in 2019-2022, and Cochair of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in 2018. She is also the author of Container Security, published by O'Reilly. She has a wealth of software development, team, and product management experience from working on network protocols and distributed systems, and in digital technology sectors such as VOD, music, and VoIP. When not writing code, or talking about it, Liz loves riding bikes in places with better weather than her native London, competing in virtual races on Zwift, and making music under the pseudonym Insider Nine.

Adrian Cockcroft has played an instrumental role in shaping the modern cloud computing landscape, particularly through his contributions at Netflix and later at Amazon Web Services (AWS). With a background in computer science, Cockcroft’s career has spanned various roles, including developer, architect, and executive positions, where his insights into scalable, resilient systems design have had a profound impact. At Netflix, Cockcroft was the Cloud Architect responsible for leading the company’s migration to a fully cloud-based architecture. This pioneering work not only helped Netflix scale its services to millions of users worldwide but also served as a case study for many other organizations transitioning to the cloud. His approach emphasized the importance of microservices architecture, continuous deployment, and automation to achieve reliability, scalability, and agility. After Netflix, Cockcroft joined AWS as Vice President of Cloud Architecture Strategy. In this role, he has been instrumental in guiding AWS customers and the industry at large on best practices for cloud adoption and optimization. His expertise in cloud computing, DevOps practices, and microservices architecture has made him a highly respected figure in the tech community. Cockcroft is also known for his contributions to open source and for being an advocate for the adoption of cloud-native technologies. He frequently shares his knowledge and insights through speaking engagements at technology conferences, blog posts, and social media, making complex concepts accessible to a broader audience. Throughout his career, Cockcroft has been recognized as a forward-thinker and a key influencer in the cloud computing domain, helping shape the strategies of some of the most significant players in the tech industry. His work continues to inspire many in the field of software engineering, DevOps, and cloud architecture. Check out his latest blog on Platform Engineering: https://adrianco.medium.com/platform-engineering-teams-done-right-b3b3d4a8ad23

Ramiro Berrelleza is one of the founders of Okteto. He has spent most of his career (and his free time) building cloud services and developer tools. Before starting Okteto, Ramiro was an Architect at Atlassian and a Software Engineer at Microsoft Azure. Originally from Mexico, he currently lives in San Francisco. Check out Okteto's DevX All Day Newsletter and get free stickers! >> https://ramiroberrelleza.com/ >> https://linkedin.com/in/ramiroberrelleza >> https://twitter.com/rberrelleza

Kelsey Hightower is a minimalist.

Donnie Berkholz, Ph.D., is the founder & chief analyst at Platify Insights, the only analyst firm for technology platforms. Before that, he was SVP Product Management at Percona, the unbiased open-source database company, where he led product management, design, and community. Previously he served as VP Products & Advisor at Docker, where he built a developer-focused product strategy with a product-led growth model, with his contributions resulting in a 4x year-over-year increase in ARR. His extensive experience includes acting as Executive in Residence at Scale Venture Partners, leading the DevOps transformation at travel-tech leader CWT (fka Carlson Wagonlit Travel), advising upon development, DevOps and data science at industry-analyst firms 451 Research (acquired by S&P Global) and RedMonk, and leading more than 250 open-source contributors at Gentoo Linux. He also spent more than a decade in computational & experimental drug discovery and biochemistry, including a fellowship at Mayo Clinic. Donnie holds a Ph.D. in biochemistry and biophysics from Oregon State University, where he specialized in computational structural biology, and dual B.S. and B.A. degrees in biochemistry and chemistry from the University of Richmond. Follow Donnie on Linkedin & Twitter

Pavel has been a Backend Engineer for years before switching to a DevOps role at Forter — the leading trust as a service unicorn startup. Three years ago, he transitioned into an Engineering Manager role in a team responsible for Forter's CI/CD pipelines and internal developer platform. Since becoming an EM, he has been focused on maintaining happy and effective teams, and he is passionate about developer experience. Check out Pavel's blog: https://islandofsignal.com/ and his talk from PlatformCon 2023 https://2023.platformcon.com/talks/the-roadmap-impact-a-blueprint-for-success

Nilesh is a Vice President at DBS Bank, where he leads the design and implementation of scalable and innovative solutions using hybrid cloud, big data, and emerging technologies. He has over 2 decades of experience as a software developer, architect, and leader in various domains such as BFSI, healthcare, and retail. He is a Microsoft MVP for Azure since 2018 and the first Docker Captain in Singapore for his excellent contributions to technical communities. Nilesh is passionate about learning, adopting, and experimenting with new technologies, and sharing his knowledge and insights through blogging, speaking, and organizing events. He is a certified Azure Solutions Architect Expert, DevOps, and Data Engineer Associate, and a co-organizer of the Microsoft Azure Singapore user group. He lives by the motto of coding with passion and striving for excellence. ------------------------------------- Follow Nilesh on social: YouTube: https://youtube.com/@nilesh-gule Blog: http://www.handsonarchitect.com Twitter: http://twitter.com/nileshgule Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nileshgule/ Github: https://github.com/nileshgule

A very special K8s4Humans episode with two absolute rockstars! 🤘🏼👨🏼‍🎤🇧🇷👨🏼‍🎤🤘🏼 ☸️ Marcelo Quadros is a Software Expert at Mercado Libre Brazil, the largest marketplace in Latin America. With over 13 years of experience, he specializes in developing and architecting complex systems for diverse domains. Currently, he contributes to the Cloud & Platform team, building a platform that manages over 26,000 microservices and supports 12,000 developers. Outside of work he likes to play with his daughter and loves to watch a good rock ’n’ roll concert. ☸️ Juliano is responsible for the Cloud & Platform teams at Mercado Libre, the largest marketplace and fintech in Latin America. He focuses on improving the experience and efficiency of the development team, creating and maintaining features and services in the Internal Development Platform (IDP), and all non-IDP infrastructure. He has been working in IT for over 20 years, leading teams with a very technical bias. Juliano loves playing video games, especially Zelda, and listening to Pink Floyd!

Sebastien Goasguen built his first compute cluster in the late 90s when they were still called Beowulf clusters while working on his PhD; he has been working on making computing a utility since then. He has done research in grid computing and high-performance computing and with the advent of virtualization moved to cloud computing in the mid-2000s. He is the co-founder of Trigermesh, the OSS cloud-native integration platform. Previously a Senior Director of Cloud Technologies at Bitnami and a senior Open Source Solutions Architect at Citrix, where he worked primarily on the Apache CloudStack project, helping develop the CloudStack ecosystem. Sebastien is a project management committee member (PMC) of CloudStack and Apache Cloud and a member of the Apache Software Foundation, he focuses on the cloud ecosystem and has contributed to dozens of open-source projects. Sebastien is currently working for Nvidia and already has 3 O'Reilly books under his belt, available on Amazon: > The Kubernetes Cookbook > The Docker Cookbook > 60 Recipes for Apache CloudStack

Pini Reznik is the CEO and Co-Founder of re:cinq, a Green Software Services business that is helping save the world by reducing carbon emissions produced by Software and IT systems. Former Software Engineer, long-time manager, tech executive, and entrepreneur. Pini was previously, CTO and Co-Founder of Container Solutions, a Cloud Native Services business, where he participated in and led dozens of cloud-native transformations and collected extensive hands-on experience in both technical and organizational aspects of the transformation. He is also the author of O'Reilly's Cloud Native Transformation book.

Ian has been in the software development industry for over 25 years, with the last 14 in management. That includes a long stint in AWS EC2 and a shorter stint at a quant hedge fund Two Sigma. Up until recently, he served as SVP of Core Engineering at Datadog, managing about half the engineering org that built the company's core data and platform systems. Ian is now enjoying his post-Datadog days and working on a new book about platform engineering.

Hans does Platform Engineering at the Norwegian Labour and Welfare Administration (NAV) responsible for the NAIS platform. NAIS is an application platform built to increase development speed by providing our developers at NAV with the best possible tools to develop and run their applications. Previously Chief Consultant and DevOps Practice Lead for TietoEVRY where he drove culture and competency building for DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), and Cloud Native practices internally and for customers in public government, telecom, banking, and insurance sectors. Open Source, DevOps, and Cloud Native evangelist. Member of the Node.js Foundation where Hans manages the test and release of official Node.js versions and the official Docker Image for Node.js with 10M+ downloads. Organiser of DevOps Bergen, Bergen NoSQL User Groups, and Co-Organiser of the DevOps Days Oslo Conference.

Charity is an ops engineer and accidental startup founder at honeycomb.io. Before this, she worked at Parse, Facebook, and Linden Lab on infrastructure and developer tools, and always seemed to wind up running the databases. She is the co-author of O'Reilly's Database Reliability Engineering, and loves free speech, free software, and single malt scotch.

Joshua Burgin is a seasoned product and technology executive with a track record of building profitable businesses and high-performance teams in both startups and established companies. He specializes in growing diverse, mission-driven organizations who ship technology products that delight customers & deliver business results. Currently, as the VP of Product & Strategy for VMware’s multi-billion-dollar Product & Cloud Services business, he leads initiatives in customer experience, software engineering consistency, onboarding, lifecycle management, devops, and security. Joshua also collaborates with the CEO, COO, CTO, and the senior leadership team to address operational, strategic, and corporate integration challenges. Prior to joining VMWare in 2022, he spent nearly 8 years at AWS in a variety of executive roles, most recently as the General Manager for the AWS Outposts business, responsible for engineering, product management, design, marketing and business development. Before Outposts, Joshua worked as Chief of Staff & Technical Advisor to AWS’s most senior executives – Charlie Bell and Andy Jassy – tracking key industry trends, formulating strategy, and developing in-depth solutions to business & technical challenges. From 2014-2019, Joshua was a Director/General Manager in Compute Services, where he was responsible for multiple lines of business, including EC2 Spot, Reserved Instances/Savings Plans, Auto Scaling and Private Pricing. During this time, he sponsored and led the successful acquisitions of ClusterK, Thinkbox & Nimble Collective – playing a pivotal role in driving the post-acquisition integration, launch and growth of new AWS services based on the acquired companies’ technology. From 2000-2014, he held product and technology executive roles at several startups, including Zynga, where he drove the development of their in-game advertising platform, increasing Ad revenue from under $5M to $150M/year, a 600% increase in under 3 years. Joshua began his career in 1997 as one of Amazon’s first 100 employees, one of Amazon’s first 100 employees, working as a software engineer when the company only sold books online, and the entire staff fit on a single floor of an office building. He is a named inventor on over 20 patents and is in high demand by the media, often invited as a keynote speaker at global conferences focused on innovation, DevOps, and cloud computing. In his spare time, he advises several early-stage startups and occasionally shares thoughts and insights via his Substack. Outside of the office, Joshua enjoys exploring new cuisines and traveling around the world with his wife and two children. At home, their household is a lively one, bustling with the antics of their beloved dog and cat. Follow Joshua on social: Twitter | Linkedin | Instagram | YouTube

Special KubeCon episode with Josh Rosso, Principal Engineer at Reddit. An experienced software engineer, author (Production Kubernetes, O'Reilly), and technical lead specializing in infrastructure and backend systems. Formerly worked on early Kubernetes at both CoreOS (acquired by RedHat) and Heptio (acquired by VMware). Don't miss out on Josh speaking at KubeCon NA '23 about Nix, Kubernetes, and the Pursuit of Reproducibility! Sched link: https://sched.co/1R2wJ Follow Josh on X, Linkedin, or his personal site: joshrosso.com To get his book on Production Kubernetes: [0]: https://lnkd.in/errNkZX [1]: https://lnkd.in/eGW-ny5