Platform Engineering

“We want to migrate to Kubernetes by November.” It was September. The client was an e-commerce company. Their biggest sales event of the year — Black Friday — was in late November. I said no. They asked if I knew someone who might take it on anyway. I did. A fellow platform engineer — someone I respect, highly capable. I made the introduction, but warned him about the timeline. He took the engagement, documented the same concerns I had, got them signed off. The client proceeded anyway. ...

“Autonomous cluster management” — the promise that an AI can monitor your Kubernetes cluster, diagnose problems, and perhaps even fix them without human intervention. It sounds like the holy grail for platform engineers. The reality is more nuanced. In this post I test K8sGPT with a locally running Llama 3.3 70B model on Apple Silicon. No cloud APIs, no data leaving your network, fully sovereign. Is this usable for real cluster diagnosis? Let’s find out. ...

I write a lot about Kubernetes. I use it daily. I’m a fan. But Kubernetes isn’t always the answer. In fact, for many teams and projects, Kubernetes is the wrong choice. Too complex, too expensive, too much overhead for what they’re trying to achieve. This is the post I’m writing for everyone considering Kubernetes adoption. Not to discourage you, but to help you make a conscious choice. The Kubernetes hype Kubernetes has won. It’s the de-facto standard for container orchestration. Every cloud provider offers managed Kubernetes. Every DevOps job posting asks for Kubernetes experience. ...