Ahmet Alp Balkan

Compute Infrastructure @ LinkedIn

Seattle, Washington, United States

About

Software engineer with the track record of managing Kubernetes infra for large-scale bare-metal fleets. I currently lead Kubernetes infra efforts at LinkedIn managing 300,000+ servers, focused on cluster/node/pool lifecycle orchestration, cooperative node maintenance, and workload federation across clusters. Previously, I've worked at cloud providers, and on various OSS projects like Kubernetes and Docker in the early days. (I still maintain some of the popular OSS tools in the Kubernetes space for fun. You may know me from projects like Krew, kubectx or go-linq.)

Experience

  • Sr. Staff Software Engineer, Compute Infrastructure at LinkedIn
    Mar 2023 - Present · 3 yrs 4 mos

  • Staff Software Engineer, Compute Infrastructure at Twitter
    Jan 2022 - Jan 2023 · 1 yr 1 mo

    Built capabilities to manage on-premises Kubernetes cluster lifecycle, and long-term investments to Twitter's scalability problems using Kubernetes. Set up team charter for a group of software engineers to built automation for deploying Twitter’s internal cluster components using declarative Kubernetes APIs and controllers.

  • Software Engineer, Dev Programs (Kubernetes Engine / Cloud Run) at Google
    Jan 2017 - Dec 2021 · 5 yrs

    Worked in the developer experience tooling in the Kubernetes and containers space on products like Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Google Cloud Run. Created Google's canonical cloud-native testbed app https://github.com/googlecloudplatform/microservices-demo, presented at various conferences. I also started some popular open source projects like grpc-health-probe, krew.dev and kubectx.dev for fun during this time.

  • Software Engineer, Azure Linux at Microsoft Azure
    Oct 2012 - Dec 2016 · 4 yrs 3 mos

    I worked on pioneering the work to bring Linux containers to Azure/Windows before Microsoft was seen as a frequent participant open source communities. I was the top contributor to the Docker open source project for a quarter in 2016. Ported Docker command-line (docker.exe) to Win32 platform, created the official Docker C# Client(donated it to .NET Foundation). I was part of the team creating Azure Container Service (with its initial Apache Mesos offering with Mesosphere), and I served at Docker Governance and Advisory Board representing Microsoft Azure.

  • Software Engineering Intern, Windows Azure at Microsoft
    Jun 2011 - Aug 2011 · 3 mos

    Worked at Azure before it was called Azure. :)