Molly Sheets, Director of Engineering for Kubernetes at Zynga, discusses her team's approach to platform engineering. She explains why their initial one-cluster-per-team model became unsustainable and how they're transitioning to multi-tenant architectures.

You will learn:

• Why slowing down deployments actually increases risk and how manual approval gates can make systems less resilient than faster, smaller deployments

• The operational reality of cluster proliferation - why managing hundreds of clusters becomes unsustainable and when multi-tenancy becomes necessary

• Practical multi-tenancy implementation strategies including resource quotas, priority classes, and namespace organization patterns that work in production

• Better metrics for multi-tenant environments - why control plane uptime doesn't matter and how to build meaningful SLOs for distributed platform health

Sponsor

This episode is sponsored by Learnk8s — get started on your Kubernetes journey through comprehensive online, in-person or remote training.

More info

• Find all the links and info for this episode here: https://ku.bz/Rmpl8948_

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A sophisticated GitLab CI/CD pipeline integrated with Argo CD was ultimately rejected in favour of simple FTP deployment, offering crucial insights into the real barriers facing cloud-native adoption in traditional organisations.

David Pech, Staff Cloud Ops Engineer at Wrike and holder of all CNCF certifications, shares his experience supporting a PHP team after a company merger. He details how he built a complete cloud-native platform with Kubernetes, Helm charts, and GitOps workflows, only to see it fail against cultural and organizational resistance despite its technical superiority.

You will learn:

• The hidden costs of sophisticated tooling - How GitOps pipelines with multiple moving parts can create trust issues when developers lose local control and must rely on remote processes they don't understand

• Cultural factors that trump technical benefits - Why customer expectations, existing Windows-based infrastructure, and team readiness matter more than the elegance of your Kubernetes solution

• Practical strategies for incremental adoption - The importance of starting small, building in-house operational expertise, and ensuring management advocacy at all levels before attempting cloud-native transformations

Sponsor

This episode is sponsored by Learnk8s — get started on your Kubernetes journey through comprehensive online, in-person or remote training.

More info

• Find all the links and info for this episode here: https://ku.bz/_MWX5m6G_

• Interested in sponsoring an episode? Learn more.

If you're tasked with performance testing Kubernetes workloads without much guidance, this episode offers clear, experience-based strategies that go beyond theory.

Stephan Schwarz, a DevOps engineer at iits-consulting, walks through his systematic approach to performance testing Kubernetes applications. He covers everything from defining what performance actually means, to the practical methodology of breaking individual pods to understand their limits, and navigating the complexities of Kubernetes-specific components that affect test results.

You will learn:

• How to establish baseline performance metrics by systematically testing individual pods, disabling autoscaling features, and documenting each incremental change to understand real application limits

• Why shared Kubernetes components skew results and how ingress controllers, service meshes, and monitoring stacks create testing challenges that require careful consideration of the entire request chain

• Practical approaches to HPA configuration, including how to account for scaling latency, the time delays inherent in Kubernetes scaling operations, and planning for spare capacity based on your SLA requirements

• The role of observability tools like OpenTelemetry in production environments where load testing isn't feasible, and how distributed tracing helps isolate performance bottlenecks across interdependent services

Sponsor

This episode is sponsored by Learnk8s — get started on your Kubernetes journey through comprehensive online, in-person or remote training.

More info

• Find all the links and info for this episode here: https://ku.bz/yY-FnmGfH

• Interested in sponsoring an episode? Learn more.

Discover how to manage Kubernetes at scale with declarative infrastructure and automation principles.

Zain Malik shares his experience managing multi-tenant Kubernetes clusters with up to 30,000 pods across clusters capped at 950 nodes. He explains how his team transitioned from Terraform to Cluster API for declarative cluster lifecycle management, contributing upstream to improve AKS support while implementing GitOps workflows.

You will learn:

• How to address challenges in large-scale Kubernetes operations, including node pool management inconsistencies and lengthy provisioning times

• Why Cluster API provides a powerful foundation for multi-cloud cluster management, and how to extend it with custom operators for production-specific needs

• How implementing GitOps principles eliminates manual intervention in critical operations like cluster upgrades

• Strategies for handling production incidents and bugs when adopting emerging technologies like Cluster API

Sponsor

This episode is sponsored by Learnk8s — get started on your Kubernetes journey through comprehensive online, in-person or remote training.

More info

• Find all the links and info for this episode here: https://ku.bz/5PLksqVlk

• Interested in sponsoring an episode? Learn more.

Dive into the technical challenges of scaling authorization in Kubernetes with this in-depth conversation about Open Policy Agent (OPA).

Nicholaos Mouzourakis, Staff Product Security Engineer at Gusto, explains how his team re-architected Kubernetes native authorization using OPA to support scale, latency guarantees, and audit requirements across services. He shares detailed insights about their journey optimizing OPA performance through batch queries and solving unexpected interactions between Kubernetes resource limits and Go's runtime behavior.

You will learn:

• Why traditional authorization approaches (code-driven and data-driven) fall short in microservice architectures, and how OPA provides a more flexible, decoupled solution

• How batch authorization can improve performance by up to 18x by reducing network round-trips

• The unexpected interaction between Kubernetes CPU limits and Go's thread management (GOMAXPROCS) that can severely impact OPA performance

• Practical deployment strategies for OPA in production environments, including considerations for sidecars, daemon sets, and WASM modules

Sponsor

This episode is sponsored by Learnk8s — get started on your Kubernetes journey through comprehensive online, in-person or remote training.

More info

• Find all the links and info for this episode here: https://ku.bz/S-2vQ_j-4

• Interested in sponsoring an episode? Learn more.

Discover how Adevinta manages Kubernetes upgrades at scale in this episode with Tanat Lokejaroenlarb. Tanat shares his team's journey from time-consuming blue-green deployments to efficient in-place upgrades for their multi-tenant Kubernetes platform SHIP, detailing the engineering decisions and operational challenges they overcame.

You will learn:

• How to transition from blue-green to in-place Kubernetes upgrades while maintaining service reliability

• Techniques for tracking and addressing API deprecations using tools like Pluto and Kube-no-trouble

• Strategies for minimizing SLO impact during node rebuilds through serialized approaches and proper PDB configuration

• Why a phased upgrade approach with "cluster waves" provides safer production deployments even with thorough testing

Sponsor

This episode is sponsored by Learnk8s — get started on your Kubernetes journey through comprehensive online, in-person or remote training.

More info

• Find all the links and info for this episode here: https://ku.bz/VVHFfXGl_

• Interested in sponsoring an episode? Learn more.

Discover how to build resilient Kubernetes environments at scale with practical automation strategies from an engineer who's tackled complex production challenges.

Grzegorz Głąb, Kubernetes Engineer at Cloud Kitchens, shares his team's journey developing a comprehensive self-healing framework. He explains how they addressed issues ranging from spot node preemptions to network packet drops caused by unbalanced IRQs, providing concrete examples of automation that prevents downtime and improves reliability.

You will learn:

• How managed Kubernetes services like AKS provide benefits but require customization for specific use cases

• The architecture of an effective self-healing framework using DaemonSets and deployments with Kubernetes-native components

• Practical solutions for common challenges like StatefulSet pods stuck on unreachable nodes and cleaning up orphaned pods

• Techniques for workload-level automation, including throttling CPU-hungry pods and automating diagnostic data collection

Sponsor

This episode is sponsored by Learnk8s — get started on your Kubernetes journey through comprehensive online, in-person or remote training.

More info

• Find all the links and info for this episode here: https://ku.bz/yg_fkP0LN

• Interested in sponsoring an episode? Learn more.

Discover why standard Kubernetes StatefulSets might not be sufficient for your database workloads and how custom operators can provide better solutions for stateful applications.

Andrew Charlton, Staff Software Engineer at Timescale, explains how they replaced Kubernetes StatefulSets with a custom operator called Popper for their PostgreSQL Cloud Platform. He details the technical limitations they encountered with StatefulSets and how their custom approach provides more intelligent management of database clusters.

You will learn:

• Why StatefulSets fall short for managing high-availability PostgreSQL clusters, particularly around pod ordering and volume management

• How Timescale's instance matching approach solves complex reconciliation challenges when managing heterogeneous database workloads

• The benefits of implementing discrete, idempotent actions rather than workflows in Kubernetes operators

• Real-world examples of operations that became possible with their custom operator, including volume downsizing and availability zone consolidation

Sponsor

This episode is brought to you by mirrord — run local code like in your Kubernetes cluster without deploying first.

More info

• Find all the links and info for this episode here: https://ku.bz/fhZ_pNXM3

• Interested in sponsoring an episode? Learn more.

Curious about running AI models on Kubernetes without breaking the bank? This episode delivers practical insights from someone who's done it successfully at scale.

John McBride, VP of Infrastructure and AI Engineering at the Linux Foundation shares how his team at OpenSauced built StarSearch, an AI feature that uses natural language processing to analyze GitHub contributions and provide insights through semantic queries. By using open-source models instead of commercial APIs, the team saved tens of thousands of dollars.

You will learn:

• How to deploy VLLM on Kubernetes to serve open-source LLMs like Mistral and Llama, including configuration challenges with GPU drivers and daemon sets

• Why smaller models (7-14B parameters) can achieve 95% effectiveness for many tasks compared to larger commercial models, with proper prompt engineering

• How running inference workloads on your own infrastructure with T4 GPUs can reduce costs from tens of thousands to just a couple thousand dollars monthly

• Practical approaches to monitoring GPU workloads in production, including handling unpredictable failures and VRAM consumption issues

Sponsor

This episode is brought to you by StackGen! Don't let infrastructure block your teams. StackGen deterministically generates secure cloud infrastructure from any input - existing cloud environments, IaC or application code.

More info

• Find all the links and info for this episode here: https://ku.bz/wP6bTlrFs

• Interested in sponsoring an episode? Learn more.

Dive into the world of Kubernetes security with this insightful conversation about securing cluster traffic through encryption.

John Howard, Senior Software Engineer at Solo.io, explains the complexities of implementing Mutual TLS (mTLS) in Kubernetes. He discusses the evolution from DIY approaches to Service Mesh solutions, focusing on Istio's Ambient Mesh as a simplified path to workload encryption.

You will learn:

• Why DIY mTLS implementation in Kubernetes is challenging at scale, requiring certificate management, application updates, and careful transition planning

• How Service Mesh solutions offload security concerns from applications, allowing developers to focus on business logic while infrastructure handles encryption

• The advantages of Ambient Mesh's approach to simplifying mTLS implementation with its node proxy and waypoint proxy architecture

Sponsor

This episode is sponsored by Learnk8s — get started on your Kubernetes journey through comprehensive online, in-person or remote training.

More info

• Find all the links and info for this episode here: https://ku.bz/sk-ZF1PG9

• Interested in sponsoring an episode? Learn more.