"Twenty years of data center, cloud, and Kubernetes ... written down so I don't forget."

Recent Posts

OpenShift GitOps Continuous Deployment

This post is part of the Red Hat Platform series. If you want the full picture of what we’re building toward, start there. Here we’re focused on continuous deployment using OpenShift GitOps, which is Red Hat’s supported distribution of ArgoCD. GitOps This post is really about continuous deployments of our sample Brix Pizza application. In a previous post we build a CI/CD pipeline that built our container image automatically after we made changes to the source code and committed it to git. In this case we want to get our application deployed to our Kubernetes cluster. ...

April 24, 2026 · 5 min · eshanks

OpenShift as a Container Platform and Why Operators Matter

This post is part of a series on OpenShift as a platform. We’re looking at the container foundation here, specifically what OpenShift adds on top of upstream Kubernetes and how Operators turn that into an extensible platform for everything else we’ll cover. Kubernetes is the Engine Kubernetes is the most widely adopted container orchestration system in the world, and OpenShift is built on top of it. But “built on top of” understates what Red Hat has done. Kubernetes is a powerful set of primitives such as a control plane, an API, a scheduler. This is the engine for managing containers on a distributed cluster. But just like your car, the engine while being maybe the most important component, won’t get you to the grocery store alone. You still need tires, a steering wheel, brakes, and a series of other things for your car to be a useful tool. Well, organizations need more than the basic Kubernetes components to run their workloads. This includes things like authentication, observability, security controls, and a console for it to be used for production. ...

April 19, 2026 · 7 min · eshanks

The Red Hat Platform

I’ve always had this feeling that if we really knew how to do IT “the right way” we wouldn’t have all these different tools and methods. Gitops vs deployment pipelines, declartive vs imperative commands, immutable containers vs mutable virtual machines. Of course over my career I’ve seen that no one method or tool is right for every situation. But I’ve always felt drawn to the utopian idea that there was a single platform everyone used and fit their needs. ...

April 9, 2026 · 2 min · eshanks

Woof - Replaced by AI

We’ve now reached the era where our jobs might be replaced by artificial intelligence. None of us are really immune to the impacts that AI will have on our jobs but I wasn’t expecting it to hit my household quite so soon. No, it wasn’t my tech job that was replaced … yet. It wasn’t even my wife’s job, but instead it was my dog Charlie’s career that was impacted. ...

April 5, 2026 · 4 min · eshanks

Brix Pizza - A Demo App

Over the past several years, I worked in marketing and spent a lot of time trying to make technical demos more compelling. The goal was always to demonstrate a capability or product feature, but there’s no reason a demo can’t also be fun, memorable, and grounded in reality. “Hello World” gets the job done, but it doesn’t feel real. It doesn’t resemble how applications are actually built, deployed, or operated. And because of that, it’s easy to forget. ...

December 23, 2025 · 3 min · eshanks