Hi, I'm James.
👋 I’m a software engineer, speaker, and technical author specialising in cloud native software, distributed systems, and networking. I’m a co-author of the upcoming book Cilium Up and Running. Currently I’m a Principal Customer Success Architect, Isovalent at Cisco. I’ve previously worked at Jetstack as a Staff Solutions Engineer, and an engineer in fintech before that.
I’m an active contributor to Kubernetes and Cilium. I was previously a member of the Kubernetes release team from Kubernetes v1.18 though v1.24, culminating in being the Release Team Lead for Kubernetes 1.24 Stargazer đź”. I’ve also served as the Emeritus Adviser for Kubernetes 1.27 Chill Vibes 🦥.
My pronouns are he/him/his.
Contact
Speaking & Writing
- Sunday 30 March 2025
“High-Scale Networking for ML Workloads with Cilium” talk at Cloud Native Rejekts Europe 2025 - Tuesday 10 December 2024
“How Minecraft Took Center Stage Instead of eBPF” podcast for Giant Conversations - Tuesday 22 October 2024
“Building an Application-Specific Container Image Builder” talk at Kubernetes Community Days UK 2024 - Friday 17 May 2024
“Episode 136: How Does eBPF Actually Work?” livestream for eBPF & Cilium Office Hours (eCHO) - Sunday 17 March 2024
“How eBPF Actually Works” talk at Cloud Native Rejekts Europe 2024 - Friday 1 December 2023
“Episode 117: A Tour of the Cilium Helm Values” livestream for eBPF & Cilium Office Hours (eCHO) - Tuesday 17 October 2023
“eBPF and Kubernetes — Better Together! Observability and Security with Tetragon” talk at Kubernetes Community Days UK 2023 - Tuesday 18 April 2023
“Talking to Kubernetes with Rust” lightning talk at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2023 - Tuesday 21 March 2023
“Enterprise Security at 3:12am: Why You Should Use a Security Key” blog for Jetstack (archived copy) - Wednesday 22 February 2023
“Rust Nation UK 2023” blog for Jetstack (archived copy) - Wednesday 23 November 2022
“Building Operators for Legacy Software or: Running Minecraft on Kubernetes” talk at Kubernetes London - Tuesday 22 November 2022
“In Clouds We Trust” talk at Kubernetes Community Days UK 2022 - Tuesday 18 October 2022
“Announcing Jetstack Paranoia: A New Open Source Tool for Container Image Security” blog for Jetstack (archived copy) - Monday 3 October 2022
“Building Operators for Legacy Software or: Running Minecraft on Kubernetes” talk at KubeHuddle 2022 - Thursday 18 August 2022
“Stargazing, solutions and staycations: the Kubernetes 1.24 release interview” blog for Kubernetes
Written transcript of my Kubernetes Podcast interview - Wednesday 17 August 2022
“The Wonderful World of Kubernetes Upstream” talk at Bristol Cloud Native & DevOps - Wednesday 25 May 2022
“Kubernetes and the Cloud Native Community” interview for The New Stack - Tuesday 24 May 2022
“Kubernetes 1.24 Release” webinar for The Cloud Native Computing Foundation - Friday 20 May 2022
“Jetstack at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2022 Europe” blog for Jetstack (archived copy) - Thursday 5 May 2022
“Kubernetes 1.24, with James Laverack” podcast for The Kubernetes Podcast from Google - Wednesday 4 May 2022
“Kubernetes 1.24 Drops Dockershim, Makes Space for Stateful Workloads” interview for The New Stack - Wednesday 4 May 2022
“Dockershim deprecated with release of Kubernetes 1.24” interview for The Register - Wednesday 4 May 2022
“Kubernetes 1.24 Release Arrives to Finally Deprecate Dockershim” interview for Container Journal - Tuesday 3 May 2022
“Kubernetes 1.24: Stargazer” blog for Kubernetes - Tuesday 19 April 2022
“Kubernetes users brace for major change that reduces Docker’s impact” interview for Protocol - Monday 11 April 2022
“Life as a Solutions Engineer” blog for Jetstack (archived copy) - Thursday 6 January 2022
“Looking Ahead to Kubernetes 1.24” blog for Jetstack (archived copy) - Tuesday 5 October 2021
“Kubernetes 1.22 Release” webinar for The Cloud Native Computing Foundation - Tuesday 17 August 2021
“Kubernetes 1.22” livestream for Red Hat Cloud Tech Tuesdays - Tuesday 20 July 2021
“Kubernetes Release Cadence Change” blog for Kubernetes - Friday 25 September 2020
“Kubernetes Operators in Depth” blog for InfoQ (archived copy) - Monday 6 April 2020
“A Kubernetes Operator for etcd” talk at QCon London 2020 - Thursday 20 February 2020
“Automating Toil by Lying to Your Boss’s Slack Bot” talk at Google Developer Group Bristol