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

I work with enterprise customers on cloud-native infrastructure, from proof of concept through production. Most recently that was at Solo.io, as a senior customer success engineer working on Istio, Envoy, and gateways. Before that I was a field engineer at Buoyant (Linkerd), where I built the pre-sales proof of concept process, contributed to a 4x increase in customers, and co-presented Multi-Zone Clusters Inside and Out at KubeCon North America 2024.

I've worked in UNIX, Linux, and infrastructure for over 30 years. I started in the data center and moved through virtualization, cloud, Kubernetes, and service mesh, and along the way I wrote Kubernetes and Linux courses, with hands-on labs, for thousands of learners, including the RHCSA 8 exam prep course I co-authored at Linux Academy and A Cloud Guru.

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.
• ok3d is a network operations center for your home on k3d. It watches every device on your network, alerts you on your phone or by email when something breaks, and you set it up and upgrade it from a web dashboard. AI agents that explain what went wrong are on the roadmap.
• 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 in development.
• macos-ai-imagegen, or mia, is a stack I'm just starting for generating AI images on your own Mac with open models, FLUX first. You'll be able to ask for images from a web page, a REST API, an MCP server, or the mia command, from any device on your network.

• 2026-11-05: Released macos-ai-imagegen v0.3.0
• 2026-11-05: Released macos-ai-imagegen v0.2.0
• 2026-11-05: Released kodi-iptv-assistant v0.9.2
• 2026-11-05: Released observability-k3d v0.5.2
• 2026-11-05: Released self-hosted-gitlab-libvirt v0.3.0
• 2026-11-05: Updated cka-d-cluster-builder-lab
• 2026-11-04: Created macos-ai-imagegen
• 2026-11-04: Released self-hosted-gitlab-libvirt v0.2.0
• 2026-11-04: Released istio-envoy-sandboxes pre-oss-cleanup-2026-11
• 2026-11-04: Updated using-kubectl-generate-yaml-manifests
• 2026-11-04: Updated intro-to-multipass-ubuntu
• 2026-11-04: Updated intro-to-multipass-macos
• 2026-11-04: Updated kubeadm-cluster-builder-aws-terraform
• 2026-11-03: Released self-hosted-gitlab-libvirt v0.1.0
• 2026-11-03: Released cka-d-cluster-builder-lab v0.3.1

• 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 · 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: Generate YAML manifests with kubectl
• Infrastructure as code: Hands-on with Terraform on Linux
• Multipass: Multipass on macOS · Multipass on Ubuntu

PDF · Markdown · All versions

southsidedean.com · LinkedIn · YouTube (tech)

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