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.
Blog
Technical notes and things I'm still learning. Not a tutorial site — more like a lab notebook.
Cockpit → cluster
Expand a series for reading order. kubectl & tools covers plugins and CLIs for daily cluster work.
Kubernetes for beginners 18 posts
- 1/18 Kubernetes mental models for beginners
- 2/18 Kubernetes as a Supermarket Chain
- 3/18 Pods, Deployments and ReplicaSets explained
- 4/18 Life of a Kubernetes Pod: a day in my shoes
- 5/18 Kubernetes Services, networking and DNS without hand-waving
- 6/18 ConfigMaps, Secrets and environment configuration in Kubernetes
- 7/18 Kubernetes storage and PersistentVolumes for beginners
- 8/18 Resource requests, limits and scheduling basics in Kubernetes
- 9/18 Debugging Kubernetes workloads for beginners
- 10/18 Namespaces, RBAC and security basics in Kubernetes
- 11/18 Your first Kubernetes cluster with kind or minikube
- 12/18 Kubernetes Ingress for beginners
- 13/18 Kubernetes Jobs and CronJobs for beginners
- 14/18 StatefulSets for beginners
- 15/18 From Docker Compose to Kubernetes
- 16/18 kubectl essentials for beginners
- 17/18 Liveness and readiness probes for beginners
- 18/18 Helm basics for Kubernetes beginners
OpenShift 8 posts
- 1/8 OpenShift vs Kubernetes: what is actually different?
- 2/8 OpenShift Routes explained for Kubernetes users
- 3/8 Security Context Constraints in OpenShift
- 4/8 OpenShift Projects and RBAC basics
- 5/8 oc essentials for OpenShift
- 6/8 OpenShift ImageStreams and Builds: a practical intro
- 7/8 GitOps on OpenShift: a practical guide
- 8/8 OpenShift day-two operations for application teams
kubectl & tools 7 posts
- 1/7 kubectx & kubens: Switch Kubernetes contexts and namespaces in seconds
- 2/7 kubectl tree: Visualize Kubernetes object hierarchies
- 3/7 k9s: Manage your Kubernetes cluster from the terminal
- 4/7 stern: Tail logs from multiple Kubernetes Pods at once
- 5/7 kubectl neat: Clean up Kubernetes YAML output
- 6/7 kubectl node-shell: Get a shell on any Kubernetes node
- 7/7 KubeKosh: Learn Kubernetes hands-on without a cloud account
Aviation analogies 12 posts
- 1/12 What flying taught me about broken deploys
- 2/12 Learning Kubernetes after aviation
- 3/12 Why I write runbooks like flight manuals
- 4/12 Staging environments are flight simulator training, not a second airport
- 5/12 Sterile cockpit rules for production changes
- 6/12 Aborting a deploy is a go-around, not a failure
- 7/12 Crew resource management on incident bridges
- 8/12 Cross-checking config before you apply
- 9/12 Degraded mode and the minimum equipment list mindset in Kubernetes
- 10/12 Capacity planning as fuel reserves
- 11/12 Readiness probes are pre-flight checks, not decoration
- 12/12 Alert fatigue and the discipline of cockpit radio
Kubernetes & platform 6 posts
- 1/6 A practical Kubernetes incident checklist
- 2/6 Network policies, one rule at a time
- 3/6 Resource requests, limits, and honest capacity
- 4/6 GitOps — trust, but verify
- 5/6 Rolling, Blue-Green or Canary? How I Think About Kubernetes Deployment Risk
- 6/6 Readiness probes are pre-flight checks, not decoration
On-call & reliability 4 posts
All posts
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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.
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.
oc essentials for OpenShift
The oc commands worth learning first on OpenShift: login and projects, how oc relates to kubectl, common platform verbs, and a calm debugging order.
OpenShift Projects and RBAC basics
How Projects relate to Namespaces, what view/edit/admin mean, ServiceAccounts, oc adm policy, and how to test permissions before they become incident surprises.
Security Context Constraints in OpenShift
Why OpenShift uses SCCs, how restricted and anyuid differ, common Pod failures, and a practical path to debug denials without reaching for cluster-admin.
OpenShift Routes explained for Kubernetes users
A 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.
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.
k9s: Manage your Kubernetes cluster from the terminal
k9s is a terminal-based UI for Kubernetes that makes navigating, debugging, and managing cluster resources faster than any kubectl command you can type.
kubectl neat: Clean up Kubernetes YAML output
kubectl neat removes the noise from Kubernetes YAML output — no more wading through auto-generated fields, timestamps, and status blocks to find what you actually need.
kubectl node-shell: Get a shell on any Kubernetes node
kubectl node-shell gives you direct shell access to any Kubernetes node without SSH — essential for low-level debugging that pod-level access cannot reach.
kubectl tree: Visualize Kubernetes object hierarchies
Use the kubectl tree plugin to follow ownerReferences and see which Deployment owns which ReplicaSet and Pod — without spelunking YAML.
kubectx & kubens: Switch Kubernetes contexts and namespaces in seconds
Stop typing long kubectl config commands. kubectx and kubens let you switch between clusters and namespaces instantly — a must-have for multiple environments.
KubeKosh: Learn Kubernetes hands-on without a cloud account
KubeKosh runs a real Kubernetes cluster inside a single Docker container with a browser terminal and scenario validation. Build kubectl muscle memory locally, for free.
stern: Tail logs from multiple Kubernetes Pods at once
stern lets you stream logs from multiple pods and containers simultaneously, with color-coded output and powerful filtering — the tool kubectl logs should have been.
Life of a Kubernetes Pod: a day in my shoes
A stable app enters the cluster — told from the Pod's perspective: who creates me, who talks to me, who keeps me alive, and how my life ends.
Helm basics for Kubernetes beginners
A practical introduction to Helm charts, releases, and values — when Helm helps, how install upgrade and rollback work, and when plain YAML is enough.
Liveness and readiness probes for beginners
A practical guide to startup, readiness, and liveness probes: what each one does, how to configure HTTP, TCP, and exec checks, and how they connect to Services.
kubectl essentials for beginners
The kubectl commands and flags worth learning first: get, describe, logs, contexts, apply, explain, dry-run, and a calm debugging order.
From Docker Compose to Kubernetes
A practical map from docker-compose.yml to Deployments, Services, volumes, and env vars — plus what gets harder and how to migrate incrementally.
StatefulSets for beginners
A practical beginner guide to StatefulSets: stable pod identity, ordered rollouts, headless Services, volumeClaimTemplates, and when Deployments are not enough.
Kubernetes Jobs and CronJobs for beginners
A practical beginner guide to Kubernetes Jobs and CronJobs: when to use them instead of Deployments, how schedules and backoff work, and how to debug failed runs.
Kubernetes Ingress for beginners
A practical guide to Ingress rules, how they differ from Services, why you need an Ingress controller, TLS basics, and how to debug empty backends.
Your first Kubernetes cluster with kind or minikube
A practical guide to running a local Kubernetes cluster with kind or minikube, connecting kubectl, deploying your first workload, and cleaning up without surprises.
Namespaces, RBAC and security basics in Kubernetes
A beginner-friendly guide to Kubernetes boundaries, permissions, and the security habits that prevent small mistakes from becoming cluster-wide problems.
Debugging Kubernetes workloads for beginners
A practical first debugging path for Pods, Deployments, Services, and the small signals Kubernetes gives before things fail loudly.
Resource requests, limits and scheduling basics in Kubernetes
A beginner-friendly guide to how Kubernetes uses CPU and memory requests, limits, QoS classes, and scheduling events when placing Pods.
Kubernetes storage and PersistentVolumes for beginners
A practical beginner guide to Kubernetes storage, PersistentVolumes, PersistentVolumeClaims, StorageClasses, and the checks that make storage problems less mysterious.
ConfigMaps, Secrets and environment configuration in Kubernetes
A beginner-friendly guide to putting configuration in the right place, using ConfigMaps and Secrets safely, and checking what Pods actually receive.
Kubernetes Services, networking and DNS without hand-waving
A practical beginner guide to how Pods get stable addresses, how Services route traffic, and what Kubernetes DNS really resolves.
Pods, Deployments and ReplicaSets explained
A practical beginner explanation of how Pods, ReplicaSets, and Deployments relate, why each exists, and how to inspect them with kubectl.
Kubernetes as a Supermarket Chain
A 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 beginners
A beginner-friendly way to think about Kubernetes before memorising commands: desired state, controllers, scheduling, services, and debugging.
On-call fatigue and the case for rest
Pagers do not care about duty time limits — what aviation rest rules taught me about sustainable on-call rotations and tired humans making tired mistakes.
A practical Kubernetes incident checklist
What I try to do first when a cluster or workload looks wrong — before random kubectl and hoping.
Network policies, one rule at a time
Zero trust in Kubernetes sounds right until you lock yourself out of DNS — how I roll out NetworkPolicy without turning Friday into a outage.
Resource requests, limits, and honest capacity
Kubernetes schedules on promises and kills on limits — why copying YAML from a tutorial is not a sizing strategy, and what I do instead.
What flying taught me about broken deploys
A personal note on habits from the cockpit that still show up when a cluster misbehaves.
Rolling, Blue-Green or Canary? How I Think About Kubernetes Deployment Risk
Rolling, Blue-Green and Canary are different ways to handle risk — not just synonyms for zero-downtime deploy.
Degraded mode and the minimum equipment list mindset in Kubernetes
You don't need every system green to operate safely — you need to know what's deferred, what's compensating, and when to stop.
GitOps — trust, but verify
Argo CD, drift, and the honest cases where Git as source of truth helps — or makes things worse.
Alert fatigue and the discipline of cockpit radio
When every ping is an emergency, none of them are — what aviation radio habits taught me about paging on-call engineers.
Staging environments are flight simulator training, not a second airport
Why a staging cluster earns its keep when you treat it like recurrent training — not a cheaper copy of production you never fly.
Aborting a deploy is a go-around, not a failure
Rolling back or stopping a release mid-flight is a trained maneuver — not an admission that the team is bad at their jobs.
Cross-checking config before you apply
Two-person review and a preflight checklist mindset for kubectl, Helm, and GitOps — borrowed from aviation, adapted for YAML.
Capacity planning as fuel reserves
Running a cluster at 100% utilisation is like planning a flight with zero alternate fuel — workable on paper until the weather shifts.
Learning Kubernetes after aviation
Notes from a Lufthansa pilot who started over in DevOps — no shortcut story, just what actually helped.
Readiness probes are pre-flight checks, not decoration
Kubernetes will send traffic to a Pod that looks "running" but isn't ready to work.
Crew resource management on incident bridges
Who speaks, who listens, who decides — lessons from the cockpit for noisy war rooms.
Sterile cockpit rules for production changes
Below ten thousand feet, pilots limit conversation to essentials — production deserves the same focus when the blast radius is real.
Why I write runbooks like flight manuals
Procedures don't replace thinking — but they buy you time when the adrenaline kicks in.