Kubernetes Unpacked Episode 028: K8s Consulting-A Journey Of Discovery And Burnout

In this episode of the Kubernetes Unpacked podcast, co-hosts Michael Levan and Kristina Devochko interview David Flanagan, a Kubernetes consultant, about his experience running his own consultancy and specializing in a specific technology or platform. David shares his career journey and emphasizes the importance of authenticity, credibility, and long-term thinking in the world of technology consulting. The conversation also touches on the use of AI in Kubernetes, the challenges and rewards of being an independent consultant, and the importance of setting personal boundaries and constraints early on to prevent burnout. David also shares his insights into some of the quirks of Kubernetes. Links Rawkode Academy on YouTube David Flanagan on LinkedIn Transcription Transcriptions happen via an automated process, so they aren’t perfect. You’ve been warned. Michael Levan (00:00:00) – Hey everybody, welcome to the Kubernetes Unpacked podcast. My name is Michael Levan, Kristina Devochko (00:00:05) – And my name is Christina Deko. Michael Levan (00:00:08) – And today we are gonna be talking to David Flanagan about running your own Kubernetes consultancy. Uh, being an independent consultant in a specific arena and not just, you know, uh, the, the cloud native or the platform engineering or just, you know, a, um, a general consultancy in that form, but really having a specific focus on, you know, a specific stack or a technology or a platform, whatever you’d like to call it. And I reached out to David, cuz I, I thought this conversation would be super interesting cuz David and I, uh, do you know, uh, pretty much almost, you know, identical to the same thing. Uh, we’ve had similar clients, et cetera. So I thought it would be interesting to just have a conversation with David and, you know, ultimately talk about what, uh, the consultancy looks like from, from that perspective of, again, focusing on a specific platform or a specific technology. David, what’s up man? How you doing? David Flanagan (00:01:01) – Hi there. Yeah. Yes, things are good. Thank you. Thank you for having me on. I’m excited to talk about Cooper’s Consult team, whatever random subject we managed to veer onto. I’m sure. Exactly. . Michael Levan (00:01:10) – Exactly. So the, the first question that I have for you is, what sparked the idea of being like, number one, I’m gonna go independent. Number two, I’m gonna focus on Kubernetes. David Flanagan (00:01:22) – All right. Two very different questions. So let me focus on one of them first, right? So what made me focus on Kubernetes? So I’ll kind of talk about my career a little bit today. Cause I think like it’s a series of unfortunate steps that got me into the Kubernetes community. Um, I’ve been a developer for 20 years, and at the start of my career, I focused mostly on rate and c um, demons for Lennox systems. And one of their major challenges were all the servers were distributed geographically across the uk, which meant when something went to shit, I jumped in the car and had to drive down to the, to where the server was, hopefully get on site at some ridiculous time in the morning and then try and fix the server and then leave. That kinda got me interested in Puppet when it started making a little bit of waves on the, the early Internets back in, when was that? David Flanagan (00:02:16) – Like 2006 maybe? And I was like, this is cool. Like I can just like write these manifests and like remotely execute commands and all these server, and of course SSH was a thing and I could have SSH done, but also things break and then SSH stops working and key management is hard. And in fact, keys back then weren’t even a thing.