In this episode of Ship It Weekly, Brian digs into 3 big themes for anyone running Kubernetes or building internal platforms.
First, Kubernetes is officially retiring Ingress NGINX and moving it into best-effort maintenance until March 2026. We talk about what that actually means if you’re still using it and how to think about choosing and rolling out a replacement ingress.
Second, we look at how CNCF is defining platform engineering and what “platform as a product” looks like in practice, plus some hard-earned lessons from running Kubernetes in production.
Third, we talk about AI as a first-class workload on Kubernetes. CNCF’s new Certified Kubernetes AI Conformance Program aims to standardize how AI runs on K8s, and recent writing on SRE in the age of AI looks at what reliability means when systems learn and drift.
In the lightning round, we hit good reads on database migrations, Postgres upgrades, and a distributed priority queue on Kafka. We wrap with the human side of incidents: fixation during incident response and using incidents as landmarks for the tradeoffs you’ve been making over time.
If you’re on a platform team, responsible for SLOs, or the person people ping when “Kubernetes is weird,” this one should give you concrete questions to take back to your roadmap and runbooks.
Links from this episode
https://kubernetes.io/blog/2025/11/11/ingress-nginx-retirement/
https://www.haproxy.com/blog/ingress-nginx-is-retiring
https://www.cncf.io/blog/2025/11/19/what-is-platform-engineering/
https://devops.com/sre-in-the-age-of-ai-what-reliability-looks-like-when-systems-learn/
Lightning round
https://www.tines.com/blog/zero-downtime-database-migrations-lessons-from-moving-a-live-production
https://palark.com/blog/postgresql-upgrade-no-data-loss-downtime/
https://klaviyo.tech/building-a-distributed-priority-queue-in-kafka-1b2d8063649e
https://sreweekly.com/sre-weekly-issue-497/
https://ferd.ca/ongoing-tradeoffs-and-incidents-as-landmarks.html
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Betrayal: Weekly
Betrayal Weekly is back for a brand new season. Every Thursday, Betrayal Weekly shares first-hand accounts of broken trust, shocking deceptions, and the trail of destruction they leave behind. Hosted by Andrea Gunning, this weekly ongoing series digs into real-life stories of betrayal and the aftermath. From stories of double lives to dark discoveries, these are cautionary tales and accounts of resilience against all odds. From the producers of the critically acclaimed Betrayal series, Betrayal Weekly drops new episodes every Thursday. Please join our Substack for additional exclusive content, curated book recommendations and community discussions. Sign up FREE by clicking this link Beyond Betrayal Substack. Join our community dedicated to truth, resilience and healing. Your voice matters! Be a part of our Betrayal journey on Substack. And make sure to check out Seasons 1-4 of Betrayal, along with Betrayal Weekly Season 1.