Kubernetes for Humans

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Jun 2026

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About the show

Real Kubernetes adoption stories from seasoned industry veterans who have the scars to prove it. Join us every Wednesday as we explore the good, the bad, and the ugly sides of technological and cultural transformations in the Cloud-Native era.

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June 11, 2026Episode 6023 min

#060 - Beyond ELK: Elastic's 10-Year Evolution, Open-Source Licensing, and the AI Frontier with Philipp Krenn (Elastic)

In this episode of the Kubernetes for Humans podcast, Philipp shares his incredible 10-year journey at Elastic, witnessing the company's massive growth from 300 to 4,000 employees. Discover the fascinating origin story of how Elastic evolved from a simple recipe search project into a global powerhouse for observability, security, and vector databases. Philipp dives into the complex realities of open-source sustainability, detailing Elastic's licensing battles with major cloud providers and their strategic return to the AGPL license to protect their work. The conversation also explores the cutting edge of AI and agentic workflows in DevOps. Imagine waking up to a midnight page where an AI agent has already investigated the root cause, analyzed load balancer metrics, and prepared a summary before your coffee is even ready...sounds too good to be true, right?

May 18, 2026Episode 5929 min

#059 - From Early K8s to the Edge: Shifting Compute Left with Dave Aronchick

In this episode of the Kubernetes for Humans podcast, tech veteran Dave Aronchick shares his incredible journey from leading the Kubernetes and GKE projects at Google to co-founding Kubeflow and his current venture, Expanso. Dave takes us back to the foundational days of Kubernetes, revealing how Google navigated the open-source landscape to establish it as an industry standard without relying on proprietary lock-ins. He then dives into his current mission of "shifting left," explaining why the massive explosion of data and physical network constraints necessitate running compute jobs directly at the edge—whether on remote solar panels or in active mines, to filter and process information before it ever moves.

May 13, 2026Episode 5830 min

#058 - The Future of AI and Platform Engineering with Blake Sherwood (Smarsh)

In this episode, special guest Blake Sherwood joins the show to discuss his unique career trajectory from tourism and coal mining to leading massive-scale Kubernetes migrations. Blake shares insights from his experience managing petabytes of data in high-compliance environments, delving into the practical realities of integrating AI into enterprise workflows and observability systems. The conversation explores the shifting landscape of platform engineering, the importance of hiring for analytical aptitude over specific AI skills, and the potential risk of developers losing their fundamental coding "muscle memory" as AI tools become increasingly ubiquitous. Looking ahead, Blake predicts that AI will act as a supercharger for platform engineering and DevOps, finally turning years of industry promises into tangible, value-driven business outcomes.

May 4, 2026Episode 5727 min

#057 - From Pagers to Pair Programming: Navigating Massive Scale and AI with Stefana Muller (Salesforce)

In this episode of "Kubernetes for Humans," Stefana Muller, VP of Infrastructure & Operations at Salesforce, shares her fascinating journey from technical support to navigating the massive scale of the Own Backup acquisition. Stefana dives into the immense multi-cloud Kubernetes challenges of scaling from 18,000 to over 52,000 clusters, standardizing environments across AWS and Azure, and leveling up security to meet stringent Salesforce standards. She also unpacks the transformative role of AI in modern operations, revealing how tools like Claude Code and Slackbot are shifting her team from basic troubleshooting to full AI pair-programming and automated code documentation, while ultimately emphasizing that human accountability in DevOps and SRE is here to stay

April 28, 2026Episode 5628 min

#056 - Cloud Contradictions and Cautionary Tales with Corey Quinn (The Duckbill Group)

In this episode of the Kubernetes for Humans podcast, Itiel sits down with the internet's favorite cloud contrarian, Corey Quinn of the Duckbill Group. Corey shares his unconventional career path as a "cautionary tale," explaining why his knack for fixing horrifying AWS bills makes him a terrible employee, and why he absolutely refuses to touch Kubernetes in production. Tune in for a hilarious and insightful conversation where Corey roasts major cloud providers like AWS, Microsoft, and Oracle for blindly shoving AI into everything from data centers to Notepad. He breaks down which AI startups are actually delivering value by focusing on specific verticals, shares his wildest "shitposting" AI side-projects (including an AI-powered singing rat trap!), and explains why AWS might be eroding its hard-earned trust in the generative AI race.

April 1, 2026Episode 5525 min

#055 - From Enterprise Java to Kubernetes and AI-Driven Infrastructure with Dan Hicks (Boomi)

Have you ever considered making a massive career pivot after two decades in the exact same field? In this episode, Itiel sits down with Dan Hicks, a Platform Engineer at Boomi, to explore his fascinating transition from a 20-year career as an enterprise Java developer to the fast-paced, ever-evolving world of Kubernetes and infrastructure. Dan breaks down the fundamental similarities and stark differences between application development and platform engineering. He shares the unexpected hurdles he faced during his transition, from complex networking and CoreDNS latency to the harsh realities exposed by chaos testing in cloud environments. Also, get a unique look at how Dan leverages AI in his daily workflow. Discover how he uses tools like Claude, complete with voice control, to map out architectural visions and reduce toil, all while emphasizing that AI is a powerful assistant, not a replacement for human critical thinking. Finally, the episode wraps up with Dan's predictions for the future of Kubernetes, the game-changing impact of the Karpenter autoscaler, and how infrastructure must adapt to support specialized AI workloads and new chipsets.

March 25, 2026Episode 5423 min

#054 - From Shiny Objects to FinOps: Taming Cloud Costs in the AI Era with Josh Schlanger (CloudXray AI)

In this episode of the Kubernetes for Humans podcast, we are joined by infrastructure and FinOps expert Josh Schlanger. Drawing on over 15 years of experience across Martech, e-commerce, and health tech, Josh shares why solving core business problems should always take priority over chasing new, "shiny object" technologies. The conversation dives deep into the evolution of cloud spending, exploring how the shift from data center CAPEX to cloud OPEX created a "Wild West" of unchecked spending that can severely impact SaaS margins. Josh discusses the expanding scope of FinOps, highlighting how the costs of data storage, observability tools, and newly adopted AI technologies (like LLM tokens and coding assistants) are rapidly catching up to traditional cloud spend. Tune in to hear Josh's insights on why R&D engineers must own cost optimization execution, why true Platform Engineering is about enabling developers rather than just rebranding sysadmins, and his practical, hands-on tips for identifying and eliminating cloud waste today. Follow Josh and CloudXray AI on Linkedin

February 11, 2026Episode 5331 min

#053 - The Road to Distributed AI and Kubernetes Infrastructure with Matt Butcher (Fermyon) & Ari Weil (Akamai)

This episode features Matt Butcher, CEO of Fermyon and creator of Helm, and Ari Weil from Akamai, as they discuss the evolution of the cloud-native ecosystem. They share their professional origins, highlighting how Kubernetes transitioned from a complex tool for experts to a foundational technology for global enterprises. Part of the conversation focuses on the history of Helm, explaining its growth from a simple hackathon project into a standard package manager. Another part takes on the future of distributed computing, specifically how Akamai is integrating infrastructure as a service to support modern workloads. Lastly, a prediction that the next major industry phase will involve the operationalization of AI, where SREs focus on managing intelligence at the edge rather than in centralized regions.

February 4, 2026Episode 5243 min

#052 - The "Short Long Path": Mastering Abstraction, Culture, and Kubernetes Scale with Shemer Mashiach (Playtika) & Scott Rosenberg (TeraSky)

In this episode, Itiel joins forces with Shemer, Director of Platform Solutions at the gaming giant Playtika, and Scott Rosenberg, Lead Architect at TeraSky, to discuss the realities of platform engineering at a massive scale. The trio dissects Playtika’s multi-year journey from a legacy, homegrown Kubespray infrastructure to a modern, holistic platform built on Spectro Cloud, all while running strictly on-premise to support 25+ games and high-volume traffic. The conversation focuses heavily on the art of abstraction, specifically how using tools like Crossplane allowed Playtika to modernize their backend without disrupting the developer experience - a philosophy Scott describes as taking the "long path" to ultimately achieve the "short path" of seamless adoption. Learn about the challenges of overcoming "people and culture" hurdles during migration, the concept of using Kubernetes as a control plane rather than just a runtime, and realistic predictions for the role of AI agents and RAG in future DevOps workflows. Follow Scott and Shemer on LinkedIn.

January 28, 2026Episode 5126 min

#051 - Surviving the Shift: From Legacy Monoliths to Day 2 Chaos with Hayato Shimizu (Digitalis)

From the early days of "neural nets" and WebSphere to the modern complexities of Kubernetes, Hayato Shimizu has seen the evolution of infrastructure firsthand. In this episode of Kubernetes for Humans, the co-founder of Digitalis joins the show to discuss the harsh realities of enterprise platform engineering and his personal journey from corporate employee to consultancy owner. Hayato recounts his career path starting in the late 1990s, highlighting how early application delivery methods at companies like Citrix served as precursors to modern containerization. He provides expert insights into the challenges of Kubernetes migration, emphasizing the transition from traditional, stateful systems to scalable, cloud-native architectures. The conversation explores the complexities of day-two operations, such as managing unpredictable traffic loads and prioritizing production firefighting over development backlogs. Finally, he touches upon the future of the industry, specifically how AI-driven root cause analysis can streamline incident resolution in high-pressure enterprise environments. Follow Hayato on LinkedIn, and check out Digitalis & AxonOps to learn more about his work in the DevOps ecosystem.