RKFleming

Forward Deployed Platform Engineer

Ryan Fleming

I ship platforms where the operators already are.

Cutovers, clusters, and identity at the edge of production — embed with the team, scale for the peak, leave systems that still work when I roll off.

Now RKE2 + Karpenter fleets sized for peak operating hours

Selected deployments Open a session
1,500+
nodes at peak · RKE2 / Karpenter
1,000+
sites · Harvester HCI footprint
100K+
identities managed · career
28K
users · Entra federation cutover

01 — Selected deployments

Field work that shipped.

Outcome-first case studies — the problem on the ground, the path we took, and the number that stuck.

01 Scale
1,500+ nodes at peak

RKE2 + Karpenter that breathes with the day

Karpenter grows the RKE2 pool into the rush, then releases capacity when demand falls.

Challenge

Demand spikes hard during peak operating hours. A fixed node pool either burns money idle or runs out of headroom when the field gets busy.

Approach

Stood up and ran RKE2 clusters with Karpenter so capacity follows real demand — nodes provision and drain with the operating day, not a static reservation. Tuned disruption budgets and node pools with the operators who live the rush.

Impact

Clusters expand toward 1,500+ nodes when the peak hits, then contract when demand falls — without babysitting the fleet by hand.

  • RKE2
  • Karpenter
  • Autoscaling
  • Peak capacity
02 Platform
1,000+ sites migrated

VMware to Harvester without taking sites offline

Challenge

Hypervisor sprawl across a national footprint. Sites could not go dark for a migration window.

Approach

Embedded with site ops to consolidate onto Harvester HCI — VM tuning, Longhorn storage, and a cutover path that kept workloads online through the move.

Impact

Sprawl collapsed onto one HCI stack. Cutover stayed boring for the field.

  • Harvester
  • HCI
  • Longhorn
  • VM migration
03 Identity
28K users cut over

OneLogin and Okta → Entra, phased for the field

Challenge

Legacy federation still held roughly 28,000 users. A hard MFA cliff would have lit up every helpdesk queue.

Approach

Sat with identity and helpdesk on a phased sunset — conditional access by population, MFA that landed quietly, and a cross-tenant federation prototype along the way.

Impact

Federation cut over with almost no field noise.

  • Entra ID
  • Okta
  • Conditional Access
04 Side project
Go DR product

Resilium · failkit.io

Challenge

Harvester-to-AWS and mixed-hypervisor shops had no clean DR orchestration product.

Approach

Built the product I wished existed at work — Go services that orchestrate disaster recovery across heterogeneous hypervisors.

Impact

A working DR path for shops that do not fit a single-cloud playbook.

  • Go
  • DR orchestration
  • SaaS
05 Foundations
20K SaaS customers

National SaaS, K-12, and the shop floor

Challenge

From RDS farms for a national software vendor to district identity and Fanuc/Mitsubishi machine telemetry — places where uptime is personal.

Approach

Delivered multi-tenant session fleets, ran identity and endpoints for education, and led an OEE pipeline into live floor visibility.

Impact

Scale habits forged where failure shows up as people waiting — still how I ship.

  • RDS
  • Identity
  • OEE
  • OT

02 — Approach

How I work in the field.

  1. 01

    Sit with the operators

    Discovery happens on the floor and in the NOC, not only in a slide deck. I learn the real failure modes before I touch the cutover plan.

  2. 02

    Ship without taking the site down

    Migrations, MFA, and platform swaps land in phases. Production keeps running while the new path takes traffic.

  3. 03

    Scale for the peak, not the average

    Capacity should follow the operating day. Clusters that grow into the rush and shrink when it ends — Karpenter and friends, not a permanent oversized pool.

  4. 04

    Leave metrics and runbooks behind

    When I roll off, the pager still has a signal and the team has a path. Observability and docs are part of the deliverable.

03 — Stack

Tools I keep sharp.

Compute & orchestration

  • RKE2
  • Karpenter
  • Harvester HCI
  • Rancher
  • KubeVirt
  • Longhorn

Identity

  • Microsoft Entra ID
  • Active Directory
  • Okta
  • OneLogin
  • Conditional Access

Network & endpoint

  • FortiGate
  • Cisco Meraki
  • CrowdStrike
  • Intune
  • NinjaOne

Observability

  • Grafana
  • Prometheus
  • ClickHouse
  • Metabase
  • Alertmanager

Languages

  • Go
  • Python
  • PowerShell
  • Rust
  • KQL / SQL

Cloud & ops

  • Azure / Arc
  • AWS
  • cloud-init
  • GitLab CI
  • ServiceNow

04 — Off the clock

When the pager is quiet.

Diesel & overland

Built Ram 2500 Cummins — G56 manual swap, Carli suspension, 37s. Overland when the pager is quiet.

Land Cruisers

Dixieland Cruisers — Toyota Land Cruiser club, organized and run as a 501(c)(3).

HF radio & SDR

Chasing FT8 across the bands and learning the waterfall. SDR hardware on the bench.

Rivers & ovals

River floats with GPX in hand, and NASCAR on the weekend. Data follows me everywhere.

05 — Contact

Open a session.

Forward deployed platform engineering · Tuscaloosa, AL

[email protected]
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