OpenShift day-two operations for application teams
Upgrades, monitoring, logging, quotas, backup mindset, and when to escalate to the platform team — the work that starts after the first deploy succeeds.
DevOps engineer with an aviation background
I work with Kubernetes, OpenShift and automation — and I still learn something new most weeks.
Freiburg area, South Baden · Kubernetes & platform work · former airline pilot
01
New here?
Start with the beginner series — mental models, the supermarket analogy, then the full path on the blog.
- Kubernetes as a Supermarket ChainA beginner-friendly explanation of the Kubernetes Control Plane, Kubelets, Pods, Services, and more through the lens of a nationwide supermarket chain.
- Kubernetes mental models for beginnersA beginner-friendly way to think about Kubernetes before memorising commands: desired state, controllers, scheduling, services, and debugging.
- A practical Kubernetes incident checklistWhat I try to do first when a cluster or workload looks wrong — before random kubectl and hoping.
Full beginner series (18 posts)OpenShift series (8 posts)kubectl & tools series (7 posts)Contact
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From cockpit to cluster
I'm Marc Wilnauer — a DevOps engineer with a few years of hands-on work in Kubernetes, OpenShift, CI/CD, and monitoring, plus smaller React and Node.js projects when they come up. I can hold my own in that stack; I still learn something new most weeks.
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Stabilise
Stop the bleeding before you chase root cause.
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Gather facts
Metrics, logs, recent changes — say what you see.
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Change one thing
Reversible steps, communicated clearly.
Flying taught me to respect procedures when you're tired, to say clearly what you see, and to fix one problem at a time instead of guessing. Kubernetes incidents feel different from an approach briefing, but the habit is similar: stabilise, gather facts, communicate, then change something.
Before tech I flew for the Lufthansa Group. That part of my life is over, but it still influences how I approach incidents and checklists. I'm not selling a big consulting package here — just sharing what I do and writing down things I find useful.
I don't treat aviation as a marketing story — it's just part of why I prefer reversible deploys, honest post-mortems, and metrics I can trust before I scale traffic. I'm still figuring out plenty in tech; the cockpit background is one lens, not a shortcut to being right.
03
What I work on
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Kubernetes & OpenShift
Day-to-day cluster work, deployments, GitOps — and the day-2 surprises I am still learning from.
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Automation & CI/CD
Pipelines, Helm, Argo CD, sealed-secrets — trying to keep changes boring and reversible.
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Observability & load
Prometheus, Grafana, and load tests (Gatling) when we need to know how something behaves under pressure.
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Small web projects
React/Node.js apps, internal dashboards, and tooling — often with Cursor or Windsurf in the loop.
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OpenShift in practice
Kubernetes with Red Hat extras — Routes, SCCs, oc, ImageStreams, GitOps, and day-2 ops. A separate series on the blog.
- OpenShift vs Kubernetes: what is actually different?A practical comparison for Kubernetes users meeting OpenShift: same core API, vendor packaging, Routes, SCCs, Projects, Operators, where skills transfer, and honest limits.
- OpenShift Routes explained for Kubernetes usersA practical guide to OpenShift Routes for people who know Services and Ingress: how Routes differ, edge TLS, hostnames, oc get route, and debugging traffic from the edge to the Pod.
- Security Context Constraints in OpenShiftWhy OpenShift uses SCCs, how restricted and anyuid differ, common Pod failures, and a practical path to debug denials without reaching for cluster-admin.
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Tech I like working with
- Kubernetes
- OpenShift
- Argo CD
- Helm
- Prometheus
- Grafana
- GitLab CI / GitHub Actions
- React
- Node.js
- Gatling
- Cursor · Windsurf
- Netlify
Tools change; the point is to understand what you're running and how to roll back when it misbehaves.
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Recent writing
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GitOps on OpenShift: a practical guide
Argo CD on OCP, the OpenShift GitOps operator, app-of-apps cautions, sync versus platform guardrails, and drift on managed clusters — without pretending Git is the whole story.
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OpenShift ImageStreams and Builds: a practical intro
What ImageStreams are for, how BuildConfigs produce tags, S2I vs Dockerfile builds, and when to skip in-cluster builds and pull from an external registry instead.
If something here resonates — a cluster problem, a side project, or just swapping notes — I'd be glad to hear from you.