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 for Kubernetes. Learn about the critical problem of software vulnerabilities (CVEs) and how Chainguard's products, including their hardened container images with a zero CVE goal and accelerated patching SLAs, address this challenge.

Dustin also introduces their newer initiatives, like Chainguard Libraries, which secures open source dependencies and builds hardened virtual machines (kernels) for Kubernetes worker nodes. He explains Chainguard's automation-driven approach, which allows them to monitor upstream fixes and rapidly rebuild and retest images and libraries.

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 API layer, Pasta.

Discover why David started his own venture, Applied Computing Research Labs, to help companies tackle the challenges of Kubernetes cost optimization and reliability. Get an inside look at SimCube, his fascinating project that simulates production Kubernetes clusters for debugging, troubleshooting, and capacity planning.

David also offers insights into the common pitfalls of low cluster utilization, the complexities of saving costs beyond low-hanging fruit, and the potential future of distributed systems.

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 clusters.

Learn how Gianluca's project tackles these 'Day-2 Operations', offering solutions that go beyond simple cluster creation and enable seamless integration of various open-source tools like Crossplane. Check out Sveltos: https://projectsveltos.github.io/sveltos/

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 migrating a large enterprise product, like navigating aggressive timelines and overcoming unexpected issues. Hasith also discusses his current role at Outshift, Cisco's incubation engine focused on innovating new ventures, and how they are building a common foundation for diverse teams.

Discover his vision for the future of platform engineering, highlighting the critical role of AI in managing complexity and enabling self-service, including Outshift's internal "Jarvis" project focused on agentic platform engineering. Learn more about the AGNTCY initiative: https://agntcy.org/

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 technologies like Talos and Civo's Omni. He also details the technical hurdles they face with Kubernetes networking (like hostport issues), achieving sub-3-second pod startup times, and optimizing container image pulls, offering insights into the unique demands of the gaming industry and Hathora's growth. Sid is the CEO and co-founder of Hathora, the premier tool for studios to globally scale dedicated servers for their multiplayer video games. Sid comes from a deeply technical background, having led infra teams responsible for $100m+ annual cloud budgets. His team at Hathora is working with some of the most anticipated games of '25 and beyond, including Frost Giant’s Stormgate, Omeda’s Predecessor, and 1047 Games’ Splitgate 2. Follow Sid on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dsiddharth/

Learn more about Hathora at hathora.dev

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 5,000 digital team members, Kubernetes introduced a new challenge: developer experience. As engineers were increasingly expected to navigate complex YAML configurations and act as operators, the need for simplification became critical.

Maxime discusses how his role focuses on bridging the gap between platform and application teams, working to abstract Kubernetes complexity without locking developers into rigid workflows. His approach is rooted in empathy, actively listening to developers and shaping solutions around their needs.

The conversation also dives into Decathlon’s infrastructure practices using Terraform and CI/CD pipelines, and Maxim’s enthusiasm for tools like Flagger and Flux, which are helping ensure safe, progressive deployments in their high-stakes e-commerce environment.

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 journey that led to vCluster's creation, stemming from the challenges of running a multi-tenant PaaS offering. Lukas also shares insights into the adoption of vCluster, including surprising stories of users running thousands of virtual clusters. The episode further explores Loft Labs' philosophy on balancing open source and commercial offerings.

The highlight? The announcement of vNode, a brand new commercial product for virtualizing nodes and achieving node-level security to separate vClusters even further. Understand the limitations of existing solutions like micro-VMs and GVisor and how VNode offers a lightweight alternative using Linux kernel magic. Finally, Lukas shares his prediction on the future of virtualization, suggesting a shift away from traditional VMs towards lighter-weight solutions like VNode.

Check out Loft Labs: https://www.loft.sh/ Learn more about vNode: https://www.vnode.com/

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 ecosystem, improve their community outreach, brand building, and user adoption. Examples of successful community building, like GitLab and Dagger, are mentioned. Jono concludes with advice on how companies can stand out at events and in their broader engagement strategies by being unique and fostering genuine interactions.