about

I’m Goutham. At Akamai I build an opinionated Kubernetes platform as a product — upstream Kubernetes and Cluster API underneath, a set of deliberate choices on top.

The opinions are the product. Kubernetes will let you do very nearly anything, which is not the same thing as helping you. A platform has to decide on its users’ behalf: what to expose, what to hide, which defaults to enforce, and which escape hatches to leave unlocked. Hold too few opinions and you’ve shipped raw Kubernetes with a support contract. Hold too many and you’ve built a cage with good docs. Finding the balance between those two is the job.

Mr. Miyagi had it right, as usual: “Balance good, karate good. Everything good. Balance bad, better pack up, go home.” He was totally talking about platform APIs. In practice, balance looks like control-plane networking, certificate rotation, RBAC, container runtime configuration, and the long tail of things that only break at scale, in clusters you don’t own — fun innit?

I write here for people who work on this stuff — platform engineers, cluster operators, anyone who has read a Kubernetes changelog on purpose. No schedule. til is the shorter version — a few sentences on something small I worked out. Those are half for me, but they’re public because somebody else has almost certainly hit the same thing.

You can find me on GitHub and LinkedIn, or email me at just.goutham.k@gmail.com. I like getting mail about posts, especially the “you got this subtly wrong and here’s why” kind.