Kubernetes for Humans
Real Kubernetes adoption stories from seasoned industry veterans who have the scars to prove it. Join us every Wednesday as we explore the good, the bad, and the ugly sides of technological and cultural transformations in the Cloud-Native era.
Episodes
#060 - Beyond ELK: Elastic's 10-Year Evolution, Open-Source Licensing, and the AI Frontier with Philipp Krenn (Elastic)
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 o
#059 - From Early K8s to the Edge: Shifting Compute Left with Dave Aronchick
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
#058 - The Future of AI and Platform Engineering with Blake Sherwood (Smarsh)
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
#057 - From Pagers to Pair Programming: Navigating Massive Scale and AI with Stefana Muller (Salesforce)
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
#056 - Cloud Contradictions and Cautionary Tales with Corey Quinn (The Duckbill Group)
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 hilariou
#055 - From Enterprise Java to Kubernetes and AI-Driven Infrastructure with Dan Hicks (Boomi)
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 dif
#054 - From Shiny Objects to FinOps: Taming Cloud Costs in the AI Era with Josh Schlanger (CloudXray AI)
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
#053 - The Road to Distributed AI and Kubernetes Infrastructure with Matt Butcher (Fermyon) & Ari Weil (Akamai)
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 grow
#052 - The "Short Long Path": Mastering Abstraction, Culture, and Kubernetes Scale with Shemer Mashiach (Playtika) & Scott Rosenberg (TeraSky)
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
#051 - Surviving the Shift: From Legacy Monoliths to Day 2 Chaos with Hayato Shimizu (Digitalis)
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
#050 - Data Protection and Kubernetes Resilience with Michael Cade & Julia Furst Morgado (Veeam)
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
#049 - The AI Translator: Using LLMs & MCP for K8s Operations & Self-Healing Infra with Alexei Ledenev (doit)
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
#048 - Shaping the Future of Software Development with Idan Gazit (GitHub Next)
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
#047 - Securing the Software Supply Chain and Kubernetes with Dustin Kirkland (Chainguard)
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
#046 - Simulating, Scheduling, and Saving: Optimizing Kubernetes with David Morrison (Applied Research)
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
#045 - Beyond Cluster Creation: Mastering Multi-Cluster Kubernetes with Gianluca Mardente (Cisco)
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
#044 - Scaling Platforms and Pioneering AI Agents with Hasith Kalpage (Outshift by Cisco)
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
#043 - Gaming on K8s: Stateful Servers, Low Latency, and an Incredible Infra Journey with Siddharth Dhulipalla (Hathora.dev)
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
#042 - Cloud-Native Evolution: Simplifying K8s for Developers with Maxime Veroone (Decathlon)
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
#041 - Virtualizing Kubernetes with Lukas Gentele (Loft Labs)
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
#040 - Beyond Mere Penguins: Crafting Engaging Developer Communities with Jono Bacon (Stateshift)
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
#039 - Banking on Kubernetes: From Fintech Frontier to Regulatory Reality with Kasper Nissen (Dash0)
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
#038 - Kubernetes Supercharging Particle Physics with Ricardo Rocha (CERN)
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
#037 - Problem First, Kubernetes Second: Insights from Ahmed Bebars (New York Times | CNCF)
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
#036 - Beyond Kubernetes: A Radical Vision for the Future of Infrastructure with Adam Jacob (System Initiative)
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
#035 - A Veteran of the Container Wars on the Past, Present, and Future of Cloud Native with Dan Ciruli (Nutanix)
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,
#034 - Infrastructure Automation & the Future of Ops with Cory O'Daniel (Massdriver)
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 operatio
#033 - Kubernetes for Humans Podcast with Mirko Novakovic (dash0)
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 fos
#032 - Kubernetes for Humans Podcast with Solomon Hykes (Dagger.io)
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
#031 - Kubernetes for Humans Podcast with Daniel Bryant (Syntasso)
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
#030 - Kubernetes for Humans with Ellen Chisa (Boldstart Ventures)
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 toolin
#029 - Kubernetes for Humans Podcast with Elizabeth K. Joseph & Holger Wolf (IBM)
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 Philadelp
#028 - Kubernetes for Humans Podcast with Chris Bailey (IBM Instana)
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
#027 - Kubernetes for Humans Podcast with Ben Sigelman (ServiceNow)
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 defin
#026 - Kubernetes for Humans Podcast with BJ Badyk (Nexxen)
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 w
#025 - Kubernetes for Humans Podcast with Ashan Senevirathne & Joel Studler (Swisscom)
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 col
#024 - Kubernetes for Humans Podcast with Gabriele Bartolini [EDB]
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
#023 - Kubernetes for Humans Podcast with Liz Rice (Isovalent)
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
#022 - Kubernetes for Humans with Adrian Cockcroft (Nubank)
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
#021 - Kubernetes for Humans Podcast with Ramiro Berrelleza (Okteto)
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://
#020 - Kubernetes for Humans Podcast with Kelsey Hightower
Kelsey Hightower is a minimalist.
#019 - Kubernetes for Humans Podcast with Donnie Berkholz (Platify Insights)
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
#018 - Kubernetes for Humans Podcast with Pavel Brodsky (Forter)
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 d
#017 - Kubernetes for Humans Podcast with Nilesh Gule (DBS Bank)
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 Singap
#016 - Kubernetes for Humans Podcast with Marcelo Quadros & Juliano Martins (Mercado Libre)
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
#015 - Kubernetes for Humans Podcast with Sébastien Goasguen (Nvidia)
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
#014 - Kubernetes for Humans Podcast with Pini Reznik (Container Solutions/re:cinq)
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
#013 - Kubernetes for Humans Podcast with Ian Nowland (Datadog)
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 a
#012 - Kubernetes for Humans Podcast with Hans Kristian Flaatten (NAV)
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
#011 - Kubernetes for Humans Podcast with Charity Majors (Honeycomb.io)
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.
Recommended
Shepherds of the Wild Podcast
Mindset Of Excellence
Greg Laurie: Daily Devotions
A Drunk History Of Middle-earth
The Daily Scripture Podcast
Praying Through Scripture with Christina Hannan
WELS - Daily Devotions
Daily Scripture: Chronological Bible Readings (KJV)
Fundamentals of Software Engineering
Cara Says It All
Washed in the Word
AI Proving Ground Podcast: Exploring Artificial Intelligence & Enterprise AI with World Wide Technology
