Senior Customer Success Engineer · Kubernetes, service mesh & AI gateways · Linux infrastructure & training · Chicago · Open to new roles

I help teams succeed with cloud-native infrastructure, and I've spent over 30 years doing the work myself. I started on UNIX and Linux in the data center and moved through virtualization, cloud, Kubernetes, and service mesh. Most recently I was a senior customer success engineer at Solo.io, working with customers on cloud connectivity and agentic AI. Before that I was a field engineer at Buoyant (Linkerd), where I wrote and co-presented Multi-Zone Clusters Inside and Out at KubeCon North America 2024. Earlier, at Linux Academy and A Cloud Guru, I co-authored the RHCSA 8 exam prep course, and I've helped build hands-on lab platforms for Kubernetes training.

I'm open to new roles, and always happy to talk shop: tom@southsidedean.com

Most of my GitHub time these days goes to kodi-iptv-assistant, or kia for short. It started as an itch to scratch with IPTV program guides, and it's the project that finally got me coding with Claude at home, after I started using it at work in early 2026. Home media stacks are a pain to set up and keep running. That kind of hassle has kept me away from plenty of cool technology over the years, so I want kia to get people to a working stack quickly. kia and my home network monitor, ok3d, are useful on their own, and they're also where I work on agentic use cases, building things that weren't possible before.

• kodi-iptv-assistant tests thousands of free IPTV streams every night and serves a working playlist and program guide to Kodi, Plex, Jellyfin, and other players. An AI assistant can help run it, and changes wait for your approval.
• observability-k3d is now ok3d, a network operations center for your home on k3d. It watches every device on your network and alerts you when something breaks. I'm rebuilding it release by release.
• My CKA/CKAD cluster builders, cka-d-cluster-builder-lab for a KVM host and kubeadm-cluster-builder-aws-terraform for AWS EC2, are practice labs. Terraform builds the nodes, and a walkthrough takes you from bare VMs to a working kubeadm cluster. A Multipass version for macOS and Linux is next.

• 2026-10-30: Updated kodi-iptv-assistant
• 2026-10-30: Released observability-k3d v0.5.0
• 2026-10-30: Released kubeadm-cluster-builder-aws-terraform v0.2.0
• 2026-10-30: Created cka-d-cluster-builder-multipass
• 2026-10-30: Updated istio-envoy-sandboxes
• 2026-10-29: Released kodi-iptv-assistant v0.8.5
• 2026-10-29: Released cka-d-cluster-builder-lab v0.3.0
• 2026-10-29: Released cka-d-cluster-builder-lab v0.2.1

• Cloud native: Kubernetes · Istio · Linkerd · Envoy · Gateway API · Helm · Docker · Podman
• AI infrastructure: kagent · agent and MCP gateways · LLM integration
• Cloud and IaC: AWS · Azure · GCP · Terraform · CloudFormation · GitLab CI/CD · GitHub Actions
• Observability: Prometheus · Grafana · Loki · Kiali
• Linux and systems: RHEL · Ubuntu · SUSE · KVM · VMware · Bash · Python · Ansible

Certifications: CKA · CKAD · AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner · Azure Fundamentals

Step-by-step tutorials from my blogging and teaching:

• Kubernetes: Deploy KIND with Podman (macOS) · Deploy KIND with Podman (Ubuntu) · Generate YAML manifests with kubectl · Deploy Confluence on Kubernetes
• Podman: Confluence in a Podman pod · Generate and test Kubernetes manifests with Podman
• Infrastructure as code: Hands-on with Terraform on Linux
• Multipass: Multipass on macOS · Multipass on Ubuntu

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