Kubernetes at LinkedIn, with Ahmet Alp Balkan and Ronak Nathani

Mar 25, 2025

Ahmet Alp Balkan and Ronak Nathani are software engineers at LinkedIn compute infrastructure team running the Kubernetes platform for LinkedIn and they joined us today to talk about how they run Kubernetes at scale and what they learned along the way.

 

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News of the week

• CubeFS was moved to the CNCF Graduated Maturity Level.

• CNCF Maturity Levels

• Canonical announced 12 year Kubernetes Long Term Support.

• Kubernetes Community Days (KCDs)

Links from the interview

• LinkedIn Engineering Blog- Stateful workload operator: stateful systems on Kubernetes at LinkedIn

• Kubernetes Blog: How we run Kubernetes in Kubernetes aka Kubeception

• Flannel: Flannel is a simple and easy way to configure a layer 3 network fabric designed for Kubernetes.

• Spanner: Google Cloud's globally-distributed database service.

• Kubernetes Architecture - learn more about the control plane from the Kubernetes docs!

• Kubernetes Resource Model

• Kubernetes Resource Orchestrator (KRO)

• Ahmet Alp Balkan Blog: So you wanna write Kubernetes controllers?