Former Navy Engineman Scott W Houghton transforms a real pirate attack on the USS Ashland into the most memorable Kubernetes lesson you'll ever hear. Drawing from his experience during the April 10, 2010 engagement in the Gulf of Aden, Scott parallels naval operations with container orchestration, making complex DevSecOps concepts crystal clear through military analogies.

Episode Highlights:

• Real combat story from USS Ashland's pirate encounter
• Kubernetes fundamentals explained through naval operations
• EOSS procedures as Infrastructure as Code
• Military redundancy parallels to high availability
• Practical implementation tips for production clusters
• Faith perspective on discipline and preparation

Timestamps

[00:00:00] Cold Open - USS Ashland under attack [00:01:00] Introduction - What is Kubernetes? [00:02:00] Naval Engineering 101 - Setting the stage [00:03:00] The Pirate Attack - April 10, 2010 [00:05:00] General Quarters - Rolling updates in action [00:07:00] Node Structure - Divisions and departments [00:08:00] EOSS - Your Infrastructure as Code [00:09:00] Observability - Watch logs and monitoring [00:10:00] Chaos Engineering - Drilling for failure [00:11:00] Service Mesh - Sound-powered phones analogy [00:12:00] Defense in Depth - Layered security [00:13:00] Faith Application - Romans 8:28 [00:14:00] Practical Implementation - Namespaces and labels [00:15:00] ConfigMaps, Secrets, and Helm [00:16:00] Incident Response - After-action reviews [00:17:00] Not heroics, but discipline [00:18:00] Ship longevity and cluster management [00:19:00] Five practical takeaways [00:20:00] Closing thoughts on discipline [00:21:00] Next episode preview

Key Takeaways

1. Orchestration is Discipline: Success comes from systematic responses, not heroics
2. Redundancy Saves Lives: Whether engine rooms or control planes, build for failure
3. Everything Observable: You can't manage what you can't measure
4. Documentation Matters: EOSS = Infrastructure as Code = Repeatability
5. Cross-Training Essential: No single points of failure in people or pods

Technical Concepts Covered

• Kubernetes control plane and worker nodes
• Namespaces and resource isolation
• Labels and selectors for organization
• ConfigMaps and Secrets management
• Service mesh (Istio/Linkerd) architecture
• Pod Security Admission (PSA) policies
• Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA)
• Chaos engineering principles
• RBAC and network policies
• Helm charts and operators

Resources Mentioned

• USS Ashland (LSD-48) - Whidbey Island-class
• Kubernetes documentation
• Prometheus and Grafana monitoring
• ELK/Splunk for logging
• Netflix Chaos Monkey
• Pod Security Admission (replacing deprecated PSP)

Military-to-Tech Parallels

• EOSS → Infrastructure as Code
• Watch logs → Observability stack
• Battle stations → Pod scheduling
• Engine redundancy → High availability
• Sound-powered phones → Service mesh
• Damage control → Chaos engineering
• Watch rotation → Rolling updates

Episode Notes

This episode contains descriptions of military combat. Weapon specifics reflect firsthand shipboard experience. Official Navy releases for April 10, 2010 confirmed the engagement but did not specify all tactical details discussed.

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