Introduction
I’ve spent the last decade automating everything that moves. Turning VMs into containers, containers into orchestrated workloads, and Git repos into self-healing production platforms. I’m a Kubernetes platform engineer by trade, addicted to GitOps, service meshes, and the beautiful chaos of multi-cluster architectures.
But lately? I’ve been spending more time thinking about how to break things than how to build them.
The pivot
My trajectory hasn’t been textbook. I started in the trenches: cross-platform support, Linux administration, the whole spectrum, and then the cloud native wave hit. The shift to Kubernetes felt inevitable; it was the evolution of infrastructure as code, the promise of immutable systems and automated resilience.
Yet the deeper I got into platform engineering (migrating thousands of workloads, enabling service meshes for enterprise teams, architecting zero-trust networking with Istio), the more I realized we were building incredible machines with slightly rusty locks.
Why platform engineers make the best security pros
We’re already the gatekeepers. We design the network policies, manage the identity workflows, and maintain the control planes where applications live or die. When I implemented GitOps at scale or migrated clusters across data centers, I wasn’t just optimizing for uptime; I was designing security architecture, just without the adversarial mindset.
That’s changing. I’m currently pursuing advanced cybersecurity certifications while leveraging my CKS (Certified Kubernetes Security Specialist) foundation. Not to abandon my Helm charts, but to harden them. To understand that a misconfigured ArgoCD AppSet or an over-permissive RBAC role isn’t just technical debt: it’s an attack vector waiting to be exploited.
The convergence
Cloud native security isn’t a separate silo; it’s embedded in every pull request, every CRD, every sidecar proxy. Platform engineers who understand both the architecture and the threat landscape will define the next standard of infrastructure.
If you’re building Kubernetes platforms, start thinking like a defender. And if you’re in security, pair up with your platform team. They speak the language of modern infrastructure fluently.
Next chapter: Securing what we’ve built, by design.