All posts by Kim McMahon

Most platform engineering conversations tend to split into two rooms pretty quickly. The first room is full of teams who don’t have a platform yet. Scattered scripts, tribal knowledge, and every team is doing the same...

In case you missed it: OpenTelemetry (OTel) has officially achieved CNCF graduated status! It now stands proudly alongside amazing open source projects such as Kubernetes and Prometheus, to name just a few. It’s been a long...

Kubernetes made infrastructure more programmable, scalable, and resilient. It also made production systems harder to reason about. Workloads move, replicas churn, dependencies multiply, and a single user request can cross ingress, services, queues, storage, and background...

The 3 AM Call We got paged one Tuesday morning. A critical production service had crashed under traffic—not gradually degraded, but crashed. Hundreds of pending pods. Users were seeing 15–20% error rates. The incident postmortem was...

Kubernetes has given platform teams a consistent way to deploy, scale, and operate containerized applications. Now, many of those same teams are being asked to support AI. The transition is already underway. According to the CNCF...

An AI factory is not just a model or a cluster. It is a pool of GPUs that many teams draw from at once: one team fine-tuning, another serving inference, a third running evaluations, all on...

Clear patterns have emerged from governance reviews across 72 CNCF projects, distinguishing between what the CNCF requires at each maturity level versus what the data recommends for long-term project health. This post captures those patterns as...

It’s no secret that developers are increasingly being asked to shift left. It seems there’s always something new to shift left on. And now developers are being asked to shift left on observability. This means that...

As a recovering VMware architect, it took me a little while to grasp Kubernetes. And I noticed I’m not alone in this.. From developers on our own team who need to get fluent in Kubernetes fast...

The problem: Humans shouldn’t be correlation engines At Atlassian’s scale, hundreds of interconnected microservices distributed across multiple regions mean a production incident generates an overwhelming volume of telemetry. The problem is that finding the causal factor...

Slow SQL queries degrade user experience, cause cascading failures, and turn simple operations into production incidents. The traditional fix? Collect more telemetry. But more telemetry means more things to look at, not necessarily more understanding. Instead...

Get ready to connect, learn, and innovate right in your backyard. Kubernetes Community Days (KCDs) are officially kicking off for H1! Supported by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), these community-organized events bring open source adopters...

A lesson from 1917 In January 1917, Germany sent a secret telegram. It went to Mexico. The offer: join the war against the United States, and you can have Texas, Arizona and New Mexico back. The...

Where does Kyverno live in your organization? I don’t mean which cluster! On which team’s slide deck does it show up? Whose budget line?  For most companies I’ve talked to, the answer is security. Kyverno is...

When people talk about cloud sovereignty, the conversation often starts with regions: where a workload runs and where its data is stored. But choosing a region is only part of the story. The architecture of the...

If you have yet to meet Phippy, she’s a friendly PHP app exploring the cloud native world with her pals. Over the last decade, Phippy’s circle has grown to include eighteen friends, with the newest members...

Once upon a time, upgrading a Kubernetes control plane meant staying awake for it. SSH into every node. Run the upgrade by hand. Watch etcd health the whole time, hoping quorum holds through every reboot. This...

Dragonfly speeds up file and container image distribution using peer-to-peer (P2P) technology, but a standard installation deploys several components and dependencies. Beyond the Scheduler, Seed Client, and Client that move data, a traditional setup requires a...

A few years ago, getting a model into production meant a data scientist, a DevOps engineer, and a narrow set of tools: train it, test it, ship it, watch the dashboards. Large language models broke that...

As parents in tech, we’ve learned that neither children nor applications thrive without clear boundaries. There are no “good” or “bad” kids, just as there are no inherently “good” or “bad” applications, only behaviors shaped by...