Processes

The path into platform engineering has changed. Many engineers today start their careers working directly with Kubernetes, writing YAML and managing Helm charts before they ever spend extended time at a Linux terminal. The tooling is so well-abstracted that you can be genuinely productive for months before the underlying system ever becomes relevant. That is a real achievement for the ecosystem. The gap shows up at the worst moments, though: a container crashes with a permission error, a security team flags a pod running as root, a privilege escalation CVE lands and it is not clear whether the cluster is exposed. These are Linux problems, and they are much easier to reason about once you understand what the YAML actually maps to at the kernel level. I have been in those conversations many times, and I always come back to the same set of fundamentals. ...