Alireza Gharib Blog

Since its inception in 2014, Giant Swarm has been 100% remote — not as an afterthought or a late-minute addendum but as part of its core (and I think very cool) founding philosophy.  An ever-evolving philosophy that challenges the status quo and invites us to do things better and differently, all while not taking itself…

As we soon celebrate our 10th birthday, we’ve been reflecting on what’s driven us since those early days — a mission to make our customers happy. That founding spirit fuels our excitement for Giant Swarm Platform 3.0. This release is special because it marries the hard-earned knowledge we’ve gained from a decade of managing Kubernetes…

The cloud and DevOps promised to make our infrastructure faster, cheaper and easier. However, in many organizations, this promise, unfortunately, fell short. Engineering teams find themselves trapped in a cycle of duplicating infrastructure, agonizing over the tools and components for each ‘unique’ use case, grappling with security concerns, and ultimately navigating the complex realm of…

Hard to fathom we’re already a month into 2024! With the new year comes speculation about what’s on the horizon. Peeking around the corner at what’s next is one of my favorite pastimes. But before gazing farther ahead, it’s worth glancing back… In retrospect, 2023 was a transformative year. We connected IRL at KubeCon, VMware…

We’re embarking on an expedition through the archives of Giant Swarm’s blog.  We’re dusting off our virtual time machines and donning our trusty Sherlock hats (aka looking at old links 😀) to decode the mysteries hidden within our old blog posts. But hold on, this isn’t a mere nostalgia trip; we’re on a quest to…

Being a 100% remote company for eight years and counting now, we’ve managed to pick up employees across the world. Situated in North America, South America, all across Europe, and even as far as South Korea! (Hey, Antonia 👋) Not to be confused with our yearly onsites where the whole company gets together (previous locations…

Volume group snapshots were introduced as an Alpha feature with the Kubernetes 1.27 release. The recent release of Kubernetes v1.32 moved that support to beta. The support for volume group snapshots relies on a set of extension APIs for group snapshots. These APIs allow users to take crash consistent snapshots for a set of volumes.…

Managing Kubernetes clusters efficiently is critical, especially as their size is growing. A significant challenge with large clusters is the memory overhead caused by list requests. In the existing implementation, the kube-apiserver processes list requests by assembling the entire response in-memory before transmitting any data to the client. But what if the response body is…

In Kubernetes v1.32, after years of community discussion, we are excited to introduce a strict-cpu-reservation option for the CPU Manager static policy. This feature is currently in alpha, with the associated policy hidden by default. You can only use the policy if you explicitly enable the alpha behavior in your cluster. Understanding the feature The…

With Kubernetes 1.32, the memory manager has officially graduated to General Availability (GA), marking a significant milestone in the journey toward efficient and predictable memory allocation for containerized applications. Since Kubernetes v1.22, where it graduated to beta, the memory manager has proved itself reliable, stable and a good complementary feature for the CPU Manager. As…