Kubex Talks

On today's episode, Andrew Hillier chats with Sachin Gharge, Head of Cloud Platform at Scandinavian Airlines (SAS). They discuss AI, agents, Kubernetes, MCP, and optimization. Sachin shares how he and his team are optimizing cloud costs, leveraging automation, and experimenting with agentic AI, including bots and Slack integrations, to make operations easier and more effective for developers and the business.

They explore the organizational challenges of AI adoption, including change management, education, and the leadership commitment required to successfully embrace new technologies. Sachin also shares his perspective on where the airline industry is headed and how SAS is putting AI to work today. This episode offers an inside look at the opportunities and challenges of AI and automation, and how organizations can implement them effectively.

ABOUT OUR GUEST

Sachin Gharge Sachin Gharge is Head of Cloud Platform at Scandinavian Airlines (SAS), where he leads Cloud Platform and Developer Experience strategy. He has spent his career building and leading high-performing platform teams focused on enabling developers to deliver business value through technology. Sachin is passionate about driving innovation, efficiency, and productivity through the adoption of modern tools and practices across the software development lifecycle (SDLC). ABOUT KUBEX TALKS Kubex Talks is a podcast hosted by Andrew Hillier, Co-Founder and CTO of Kubex, a Kubernetes, cloud, and AI company. Each episode features conversations with IT and technical leaders who have first-hand experience delivering cloud and Kubernetes-based infrastructure in large enterprises.

LINKS

• kubex.ai

On this episode of Kubex Talks, technology critic Viktor Farcic returns to talk with Andrew Hillier about the rapidly changing landscape in tech. Viktor has gone from AI skeptic to believer, claiming that there really is no life without AI anymore, from a professional standpoint.

Andrew and Viktor address the challenges of optimizing both AI workloads and the infrastructures they rely on. They highlight the importance of human oversight, the changing nature of skills and roles, and the increasing need to adapt organizational processes to fully leverage AI's capabilities. They discuss how roles are poised to evolve, with the potential for further automation and the gradual shift of human responsibility toward strategic guidance.

This episode provides an in-depth and direct conversation of where AI is driving the industry, and what that means for professionals and organizations looking to remain relevant in an era of rapid technological change.

If you haven't listened to the first episode with Viktor, make sure to check it out!

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/kubex-talks/id1687577353?i=1000708325053

ABOUT OUR GUEST

Viktor Farcic

Viktor Farcic is a lead rapscallion at Upbound (https://upbound.io), a member of the CNCF Ambassadors, Google Developer Experts, CDF Ambassadors, and GitHub Stars groups, and a published author.

He is a host of the YouTube channel DevOps Toolkit (https://youtube.com/@devopstoolkit) and a co-host of DevOps Paradox (https://youtube.com/@devopsparadox).

ABOUT KUBEX TALKS

Kubex Talks is a podcast hosted by Andrew Hillier, Co-Founder and CTO of Kubex, a Kubernetes, cloud, and AI company. The podcast focuses on interviews with IT and technical leaders and innovators who have experience in delivering cloud and Kubernetes-based infrastructure within large enterprises.

LINKS:

• kubex.ai
• upbound.io
• youtube.com/@devopstoolkit
• youtube.com/@devopsparadox

On today's episode, Andrew Hillier sits down with Manny Patel, a long-time Infrastructure Platform Engineering Leader whose career has spanned multiple focuses, including Kubernetes, automation, and now AI.

Andrew and Manny discuss the accelerating pace of AI innovation, the impact of standardization efforts like MCP, and the emergence of AI agents as powerful force multipliers within enterprise environments. They also dig into how job roles are evolving, what it means to "trust" AI, how prompt engineering is becoming a new way to code, AI native, and where all this might be heading in the next couple of years (or even months!).

It's a fun, relevant, and honest conversation about the good, the not-so-sure, and everything in between when it comes to AI in enterprise. We hope you have some great takeaways from this episode and can utilize AI in the best possible way for your enterprise.

ABOUT OUR GUEST

Manny Patel Manny Patel is an Infrastructure Platform Engineering Leader focused on building the platforms that modern engineering organizations run on. He operates at the intersection of cloud, platform engineering, and developer experience—turning complex infrastructure into scalable, self-service systems that accelerate execution without sacrificing reliability. With deep experience across AWS, GCP, and Azure, Manny has led large-scale transformations centered on Kubernetes, automation, and infrastructure as code. His approach is pragmatic and outcomes-driven: eliminate toil, standardize what matters, and create the guardrails that allow teams to move fast safely. Manny is a strong advocate for AI-augmented engineering and operational excellence, pushing organizations toward a future where systems are not just reliable, but increasingly self-optimizing. He's known for translating strategy into execution —bringing clarity to ambiguity and enabling teams to deliver measurable business impact. At his core, Manny is a builder of systems and teams—developing high-performing engineers, driving accountability, and creating cultures where ownership and continuous improvement are the norm. ABOUT KUBEX TALKS Kubex Talks is a podcast hosted by Andrew Hillier, Co-Founder and CTO of Kubex, a Kubernetes, cloud, and AI company. The podcast focuses on interviews with IT and technical leaders and innovators who have experience in delivering cloud and Kubernetes-based infrastructure within large enterprises.

LINKS

• kubex.ai
• Manny Patel's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/manny-p/

In this episode, Andrew Hillier and Bijit Ghosh discuss the evolving landscape of AI, discussing the growing prominence of inference over training, hybrid cloud strategies, balancing cost with performance, and the orchestration of complex hardware environments. The conversation also touches on emerging concepts like AI factories, the challenges of sovereign cloud, and how enterprises are navigating data gravity and regulatory constraints. It's a deep dive into optimizing AI infrastructure, managing costs, and the disruptive changes that are transforming both technology and business outcomes.

ABOUT OUR GUEST

Bijit Ghosh

Bijit Ghosh is a seasoned technology executive with over two decades of experience leading AI/ML, cloud, and data transformation in global financial services. As CTO – MD/Head of AI/ML, Cloud & Data Platform Engineering at Wells Fargo, he drives large-scale modernization of infrastructure and fintech platforms, applying AI Agents, cloud-native architectures, LLMOps, and DevSecOps to deliver measurable business outcomes. Bijit has a proven track record of driving more than $200M in savings through transformation, automation, and platform engineering, and he is known for empowering teams to innovate while maintaining resilience, compliance, and performance. He also contributes to open-source, writes on technology topics, and actively engages with the broader tech community.

ABOUT KUBEX TALKS

Kubex Talks is a podcast hosted by Andrew Hillier, Co-Founder and CTO of Kubex, a Kubernetes, cloud, and AI company. The podcast focuses on interviews with IT and technical leaders and innovators who have experience in delivering cloud and Kubernetes-based infrastructure within large enterprises.

LINKS

• kubex.ai

Andrew Hillier sits down with Dan Ciruli, who leads the cloud native product management team at Nutanix. Dan's got some great stories from his days at Google—back when cloud native and Kubernetes were just getting started, in addition to the knowledge and wisdom he picked up along the way.

Andrew and Dan talk about founding a CNCF project, and what it entailed, as well as Kubernetes in the early days and its cloud-centric evolution. Dan dives into founding the OpenAPI initiative and how it all went down. Of course, a common question is what product managers do in open source? Well, Dan and Andrew discuss it and share some good insights.

Dan discusses the Nutanix Kubernetes Platform (NKP), resource optimization on NKP, and how to give consistent view across cloud and on-prem. Dan and Andrew dive a little into the current impact of AI (although, more discussion will likely come in the future on this topic).

And just when you think it's all code and cloud, Dan drops the story of how he spent a year as tour manager for the rock band Chevelle (yep, that Chevelle)! Turns out, wrangling open source projects and rock bands aren't as different as you'd think!

Densify is certified for the Nutanix Kubernetes Platform (NKP) to provide automated resource optimization for containerized environments—bringing AI-driven insights and precision scaling to NKP users for improved performance and cost efficiency.

ABOUT OUR GUEST Dan Ciruli

Dan Ciruli is the Vice President and General Manager of Cloud Native at Nutanix. His (very long) career in product management includes stints at Google, Zuora and EMC, and in open source he was a founding member of the OpenAPI Initiative and sat on the Istio Steering Committee. In his spare time he's active in acting and musical theatre. Give him half a chance and he'll try to speak Spanish to you!

ABOUT DENSIFY TALKS

Densify Talks is a podcast hosted by Andrew Hillier, Co-Founder and CTO of Densify, a cloud optimization software company. The podcast focuses on interviews with IT and technical leaders and innovators who have experience in delivering cloud and Kubernetes-based infrastructure within large enterprises.

LINKS

• Dan in The Red video for Chevelle @1:20 and @1:40 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=trinU3VD1Zo&list=RDtrinU3VD1Zo&t=80s

Kubernetes, container resources, request and limits, sizing, the impact of getting things wrong, CPU limits, JVMs, HPA and VPA, does Karpenter fix the request and limit problem? We've got a great episode for you today!

Thanks for joining us on Densify Talks! We welcome Daniele Polencic, one of the lead instructors at LearnK8s, which specializes in containers and Kubernetes technologies.

Andrew Hillier and Daniele Polencic discuss the complexities and difficulties of resource management in today's episode. Daniele shares about the LearnK8s Instance Calculator to help avoid pitfalls. They both give their honest thoughts on Karpenter, HPA and VPA, vCluster, JVMs, and more. What about CPU limits? Is there a single solution to the challenges?

This conversation really explores the challenges, risks, hard truths, opportunities, and gives best practices for optimization!

ABOUT OUR GUEST

Daniele Polencic

Daniele is a lead instructor at Learnk8s, specializing in containers and Kubernetes technologies. A certified Kubernetes administrator by the Linux Foundation, he has spent over a decade training developers in e-commerce, finance, and public sector organizations, helping teams effectively implement cloud-native infrastructure.

ABOUT DENSIFY TALKS

Densify Talks is a podcast hosted by Andrew Hillier, Co-Founder and CTO of Densify, a cloud optimization software company. The podcast focuses on interviews with IT and technical leaders and innovators who have experience in delivering cloud and Kubernetes-based infrastructure within large enterprises.

LINKS

• densify.com
• LearnK8s Instance Calculator: https://learnk8s.io/kubernetes-instance-calculator
• Upcoming Webinar: https://learnk8s.io/smart-kubernetes-resource-management
• LearnK8s Blog: https://learnk8s.io/blog

Welcome to another episode of Densify Talks! Andrew Hillier has a fun and informative conversation with Viktor Farcic.

Viktor considers himself a technology critic (think of the old muppet critics on the balcony) and rapscallion. We think he's also quite the thought leader and author, with some very bold insights on technology that are worth hearing! See Viktor's biography below for more information about him.

Andrew and Viktor dive into the maturing landscape of Kubernetes, asking the question "is Kubernetes now "boring"?" It's a good question and Viktor and Andrew have great thoughts on it!

They also tackle AI and where it's currently at (including Viktor's experiences with AI recently). Andrew and Viktor talk about their experiences with KubeCon over the years and where it might be going in the future. They discuss optimization, cloud costs, automation, GitOps, VPA, Densify's new Mutating Admission Controller, and what's likely to come in the near future. For fun, we also get to hear Viktor's strong opinions on Helm!

We hope you get as much out of this episode as we did!

ABOUT OUR GUEST

Viktor Farcic

Viktor Farcic is a lead rapscallion at Upbound (https://upbound.io), a member of the CNCF Ambassadors, Google Developer Experts, CDF Ambassadors, and GitHub Stars groups, and a published author.

He is a host of the YouTube channel DevOps Toolkit (https://youtube.com/@devopstoolkit) and a co-host of DevOps Paradox (https://youtube.com/@devopsparadox).

ABOUT DENSIFY TALKS

Densify Talks is a podcast hosted by Andrew Hillier, Co-Founder and CTO of Densify, a cloud optimization software company. The podcast focuses on interviews with IT and technical leaders and innovators who have experience in delivering cloud and Kubernetes-based infrastructure within large enterprises.

LINKS

• densify.com
• upbound.io
• youtube.com/@devopstoolkit
• youtube.com/@devopsparadox

Welcome to another episode of Densify Talks! We're excited and honored to welcome Brent Eubanks, FinOps Architect at Wayfair. Brent brings a wealth of knowledge and years of experience in the FinOps realm from his time at Ticketmaster, Citi, Box, and now Wayfair.

Our host Andrew Hillier, CTO and Co-Founder of Densify, sits down with Brent to discuss containers, FinOps, resource optimization, AI, and Kubernetes to name a few topics.

Brent shares his insights on resource waste, and highlights his strategic approach with seven tactics to optimization. Andrew and Brent discuss the challenges of interfacing with engineering teams and how to approach that with a really helpful tip! They talk about the costs of AI, AI as an asset, and solving specific business problems with AI. Brent also shares some of his very fascinating non-work projects that he's working on.

It's an information and wisdom-packed episode! Make sure to take some notes from today's episode. We hope it's as valuable for you as it was for us!

ABOUT OUR GUEST:

Brent Eubanks

Brent Eubanks is the FinOps Architect at Wayfair. He's a hands-on leader with a passion for innovating on technologies, building effective teams and a focus on delivering competitively superior FinOps technology solutions to the business while growing people in the organization and quantifying IT transformation. Design, implement, operate platforms using AI/ML, data lake, LLM local with prompt chaining and superprompts to optimize the engineers efficiency.

Brent is a digital service efficiency expert to help enterprises plan, govern, and understand the business value to facilitate self-optimizing and self-governing DevOps CICD pipelines. Solution development and Architect optimal L1-7 stacks using Kubernetes, Serverless, AWS GCP Azure. AI ML Data Science foundation models and data exploration analytics to interact with data streams and explore price performance value.

Brent strives to achieve 'Cognitive Application Focused Environments' as a key component that will blend architecture design, robotics process automation and intercloud interoperability with process, and policy interactions to enable actions to instantly scale, migrate, administer, model, and decide autonomously how to best service the applications needs.

Cloud leaders must have the right digital economics reports, dashboards, interactive decisioning frameworks to prove that the enterprise Cloud/Colo budget $ is being spent better than last year in the context of that Enterprise Business Unit's unique needs. Brent does that by combining the vision, context, AI/ML data lake of the existing Cloud estate to produce these ITBM and FinOps valuable insights to quantify business transformation, quantify agility of IT, and track personal progress of maturity of all functional domains among the Enterprise executives.

Brent's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brenteubanks/

ABOUT DENSIFY TALKS:

Densify Talks is a podcast hosted by Andrew Hillier, Co-Founder and CTO of Densify, a cloud optimization software company. The podcast focuses on interviews with IT and technical leaders and innovators who have experience in delivering cloud and Kubernetes-based infrastructure within large enterprises.

LINKS:

• densify.com
• Papers Mentioned in the Episode:
  • https://www.finops.org/wg/effect-of-optimization-on-ai-forecasting/
  • https://www.finops.org/wg/finops-for-ai-overview/

On this episode of Densify Talks, we welcome Vladimir Remenar, Director of IT Operations at Raiffeisen Bank in Croatia. Andrew Hillier and Vladimir Remenar dive into container optimization strategies and cloud migration, discussing Raiffeisen's processes and innovative practices.

Raiffeisen Bank was early in the automation of optimization. Vladimir shares why that was the case and what that meant for Raiffeisen. He also discusses Raiffeisen's migration to cloud journey and shares challenges, benefits, and lessons learned along the way.

Andrew and Vladimir talk about Openshift license costs and Openshift to EKS. One of Densify's beliefs is using cloud as intended, using standard and open frameworks, and not locking in.

They move into the topic of FinOps and highlight how Raiffeisen approaches financial operations in their cloud journey, and the importance of continuous optimization for seamless operations.

Andrew and Vladimir also cover additional topics, including Vladimir's professional journey in the banking industry, his personal passions for fishing and boating, and their perspectives on future trends coming in the industry.

ABOUT OUR GUEST:

Vladimir Remenar

Vladimir Remenar is the Director of IT Operations at Raiffeisen Bank in Croatia. He's involved in planning, designing, documenting and leading some of the largest IT infrastructure projects. Vladimir is passionate about cyber security, security related research and mobile phone forensics.

Vladimir Remenar on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vremenar

ABOUT DENSIFY TALKS:

Densify Talks is a podcast hosted by Andrew Hillier, Co-Founder and CTO of Densify, a cloud optimization software company. The podcast focuses on interviews with IT and technical leaders and innovators who have experience in delivering cloud and Kubernetes-based infrastructure within large enterprises.

LINKS:

• densify.com
• Vladimir Remenar on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vremenar

Andrew Hillier and Ashley Rodrigue from Intel Corporation have a wealth of fantastic information for you on this episode of Densify Talks! They start off by sharing the benefits of the connection and partnership between Intel and Densify, highlighting how it benefits not only the two companies but also their customers.

Ashley discusses how Intel® Cloud Optimizer is revolutionizing cloud efficiency and tackling container-related inefficiencies. She also provides a closer look at Intel's cutting-edge 5th Gen Intel Xeon Processors and their performance improvements.

Andrew and Ashley talk about the regional availability of products and how Intel Foundry fits into that, reducing "hoarding" issues. Ashley had the privilege of touring one of Intel's production facilities and shares the impact and benefits of in-house production.

They also discuss Intel and ASML's partnership in High NA EUV technology, FinOps trends and future directions, and touch on containers and guardrails. However, they're saving the bulk of that discussion for a future episode.

If you haven't already, make sure to subscribe to the DENSIFY TALKS podcast ASAP so you don't miss an episode!

ABOUT OUR GUEST:

Ashley Rodrigue

As an Intel Cloud Partner Manager, Ashley works with industry-leading cloud partners to deliver maximum value to customers who run on Intel in the cloud. Prior to this role, Ashley was an Account Executive at Intel working with large enterprise customers in the NY metro area, helping them run best on Intel from the edge to the cloud. Before joining Intel in 2014, Ashley was an Ambassador at Lenovo where she conducted briefings for the press, customers, and business partners in North America.

Ashley holds an MBA with a concentration in marketing from the University of Maine. As part of Ashley's graduate assistantship, she worked at the University of Maine's Technology Business Incubator helping several start-up companies conduct market research, write business plans, and launch their solutions.

ABOUT DENSIFY TALKS:

Densify Talks is a podcast hosted by Andrew Hillier, Co-Founder and CTO of Densify, a cloud optimization software company. The podcast focuses on interviews with IT and technical leaders and innovators who have experience in delivering cloud and Kubernetes-based infrastructure within large enterprises.