Application Performance Tuning in Microservice Environments with Istio
Why timeouts, retries, and connection pools can turn a slow dependency into a cascading failure — and how to keep that from happening.
Spencer Smolen
Platform Engineer — Kubernetes, GitOps & release automation
Latest
Articles
New Relic as the Interface, Terraform as the Engine: A Self-Service Approach to Observability
How New Relic entity tags, Terraform, and GitHub Actions let observability administrators manage alerting without touching the infrastructure behind it.
The Queryable Platform Part 1: Your Platform Is a Graph — You're Just Not Querying It Yet
The knowledge to answer 'which services are exposed to the internet, and who owns them?' already exists — it's just scattered across a half-dozen tools that don't talk to each other. A knowledge graph is how you make it queryable.
The Queryable Platform Part 2: .From kubectl to SPARQL -- Build a Queryable Map of Your Platform in an Afternoon
A walkthrough of platform-kg: extract facts from ArgoCD, Kubernetes, Helm, GitHub, Terraform, Vault, and Istio, turn them into RDF triples, and load them into GraphDB — a graph of your actual cluster you can query in a browser.
Selected
Projects
Chartpress
Full-stack Helm-chart generation platform in Go & React. One declarative ChartpressConfig becomes a complete umbrella chart with per-service Deployment/StatefulSet/DaemonSet subcharts — exposed as a Cobra CLI, an HTTP API, and a React/Vite web app.
GoReactKubernetesclient-goS3
cookiecutter-gitops-multirepo
Cookiecutter generator for Helm-focused Argo CD GitOps repos — scaffolds ApplicationSets, bootstrap manifests, and per-cluster Helm values across dev/stage/prod with CI-driven progressive promotion.
Argo CDHelmCookiecutterGitOps