Case Study — Platform · Delivery
Shared platform delivery on GKE and Kubernetes
Contributed to multi-environment delivery tooling, Helm-based deployments, and GKE Gateway API migrations used across production workloads. The work targeted the boundary where application code meets the cluster — making rollouts safer, more predictable, and easier for product teams to use.
- Kubernetes
- Helm
- GKE
- GitHub Actions
- Docker
- GCP
- Bash
Overview
Across the engagements at Kitco and Alaska Airlines, I worked not only on application code but on the delivery pipeline that put it into production. This case study is about the cluster-side work: Helm charts, GKE configuration, GitHub Actions workflows, and the operational tooling that lets product engineers ship safely without becoming Kubernetes experts.
What I contributed
- Helm-based deployment patterns for production services, including templated value files per environment (dev, staging, prod) and consistent rolling-update / readiness behavior across services.
- Migrations to the GKE Gateway API for production workloads, replacing legacy Ingress configurations with the newer multi-cluster-friendly model.
- Multi-environment GitHub Actions workflows that build container images, push to the registry, and roll out to the right cluster context based on branch and tag conventions, with explicit promotion gates between environments.
- Readiness/liveness probe and rollout-safety tuning to reduce the chance of bad releases reaching real traffic, and to make rollbacks fast when something did slip through.
- Documentation and developer-facing scripts to make the cluster boundary less opaque for the engineers who deploy through it daily.
Why this mattered
Production reliability for the user-facing product depends on the layer no one sees: how containers get scheduled, how traffic moves through the gateway, how a bad deploy is caught before it takes down a service. Making that layer predictable and self-serve is what lets a small team ship faster without breaking things — and what makes incident response a matter of minutes instead of hours.
Outcome
The platform work supported continuous delivery for production services across multiple environments at Kitco and Alaska Airlines. Helm + GKE + GitHub Actions became the standard pipeline the application engineering work could depend on, which is exactly what a delivery layer should be: invisible when it's working, fast when it has to recover.