speaking
John Dietz
Accounts
Biography
Meet John Dietz, the friendly CEO and relentless technical cofounder driving Kubefirst, an ambitious product dedicated to providing companies with free instant Kubernetes platforms. John and his cofounder, Jared Edwards, embarked on the Kubefirst venture with humble beginnings, building the product off-hours while navigating a year-long stealth enterprise pilot before open sourcing the project onto the CNCF landscape. Kubefirst was acquired by Kubeshop in 2022, and then again by the Civo Cloud in 2024.
John’s entrepreneurial spirit sparked at a young age. At 22 he bootstrapped his own software and services company, a role he dedicated 19 years to before founding Kubefirst. During that time he doubled as engineering leads in the DevOps space in numerous successful startup and enterprise environments, gaining expertise in high scale software delivery, site reliability, platform architecture, and cloud engineering. His pivotal role in transitioning USA Today to the public cloud atop a hybrid cloud abstraction layer showcased his ability as a software platform architect of the early enterprise public cloud adopter.
John has been at the forefront of Kubernetes adoption since 2017 and has assisted hundreds of companies in their transition to cloud native architectures with the Kubefirst open source platform.
Experience
Conferences & Meetups
- Cloud Native NoVA: Platform Engineering from Scratch to Clusterception
- PlatformCon2024: Building an OSS playground in 1 command (recording)
- Civo Navigate North America 2024: Let’s Do It Allin Under an Hour (recording)
- Civo Navigate Europe 2023: Mind the Gap! Bridging the Void Between laC and GitOps (recording)
- Civo Navigate Europe 2023: Farming Cloud Native Platforms Be Prepared for the Army of Chickens and Eggs! (recording)
- Civo Navigate North America 2023: “Git” a Handle on it! A Scalable Approach to GitOps Configuration Patterns (slides)
- Civo Navigate North America 2023: 8 Steps to Build an Open Source GitOps Cloud Native Platform on the Civo Cloud (slides)
- Denver Startup week 2022: How to Start Your Startup Fast on Kubernetes (slides + recording)
Livestreams & Podcasts
2024
- Kubefirst Live - Building composable internal developer platforms (IDPs) with Kratix (July 18)
- Kubefirst Live - Keep your secrets out of your source code with GitGuardian (June 20)
- Kubefirst Live - Double Kubernetes efficiency to optimize cost & performance with StormForge (June 6)
- Kubefirst Live - Adding a Vault SSO group to your Kubernetes platform (May 23)
- Kubefirst Live - Developing in a Kubernetes environment with Codezero (May 9)
- The Security Repo - Building secure platforms with Kubernetes: Bridging the DevOps-Security Divide (April 30)
- Kubefirst Live - The kubefirst architecture: how is built the best GitOps platform out there (April 25)
- Kubefirst Live - Create production-ready GitOps clusters on DigitalOcean (April 11)
- Kubefirst Live - End-to-End testing & debugging with Tracetest (March 28)
- Kubefirst Live - Adding a new cloud provider to kubefirst: Akamai (March 14)
- Kubefirst Live - Adding applications to the kubefirst GitOps Catalog (February 1)
- Kubefirst Live - From GitLab SaaS to GitLab self-managed on kubefirst (January 18)
2023
- Kubefirst Live - Musing on platform engineering & cloud native trends with Abby Bangser (December 21)
- Kubefirst Live - Taking Ownership of the kubefirst Argo Workflows (December 7)
- Civo - Kubernetes Unpacked: Embracing GitOps & Best-Practice Tools with Kubefirst (November 29)
- Kubefirst Live - Reloader: live reloading made easy (November 28)
- Kubefirst Live - kubefirst 2.3: physical & virtual workload clusters (October 26)
- Kubefirst Live - Kyverno: a policy engine designed for Kubernetes (October 12)
- Kubefirst Live - k3d: the heart of kubefirst’s local platform (September 28)
- Kubefirst Live - Testkube: orchestrate your tests natively on Kubernetes (September 14)
- Kubefirst Live - vcluster: fully functional virtual Kubernetes clusters & how they work (August 31)
- Kubefirst Live - Civo Marketplace & kubefirst: a match made in heaven (August 17)
- Conf42Cast - Beyond Kubernetes (August 17)
- Kubefirst Live - Infrastructure automation: Terraform with Atlantis vs Crossplane (August 3)
- Kubefirst Live - Deep Dive on metaphor: the kubefirst platform exploration application (July 20)
- Cisco Cloud Unfiltered - Kubefirst: Kubernetes CI/CD should be easy! (June 26)
- Kubernetes Bytes - Accelerating Kubernetes Adoption: Unleashing the Power of GitOps using Kubefirst (June 23)
- Kubefirst Live - Monitor & reduce Kubernetes spend with OpenCost (June 22)
- Kubefirst Live - Kubefirst 2.1: Instant GitOps platform gets an amazing User Interface (June 8)
- Kubefirst Live -Monitor & Act on Your Kubernetes Cluster With Botkube (May 25)
- Kubefirst Live -Deep dive on kubefirst SSO & OIDC (May 21)
- KubeSkills - Growing in Open Source: Scaling a Project and Community (May 18)
- Kubefirst Live -Deep Dive on HashiCorp Terraform & Atlantis (April 27)
- Kubefirst Live -kubefirst 2.0.0 release livestream, with Civo (April 13)
- Kubefirst Live -The kubefirst Trifecta: NGINX Ingress Controller, cert-manager & external-dns (March 20)
- Kubefirst Live -GitOps & Secrets Disaster Recovery (March 16)
- Kubefirst Live -Integrating Argo Workflows with GitHub Actions & GitLab CI (March 2)
- Kubefirst Live -Let’s talk HashiCorp Vault (February 16)
- Kubefirst Live -Argo CD Best Practices & Practical Patterns (February 2)
- Kubefirst Live -kubefirst v1.11 Release: Local update, Improved Vault support (January 19)
2022
- Kubefirst Live -kubefirst v1.10 release & other awesomeness (December 13)
- Kubefirst Live -kubefirst v1.9 Release: Github, Hashicorp Vault and Admin Console (October 11)
- Kubefirst Live -kubefirst 1.8 Release (July 26)
Videos
Expertise
Technologies
- Amazon Web Services (AWS)
- Argo CD
- Argo Workflows
- Atlantis
- cert-manager
- ChartMuseum
- DataDog
- Docker
- GitHub
- GitHub Actions
- GitHub Actions Runner Controller
- GitLab
- GitLab Runner
- HashiCorp Vault
- Ingress NGINX Controller
- k3d
- kubefirst
- Kubernetes
- Kubernetes External Secrets Operator
- Kubernetes ExternalDNS
- MinIO
- mkcert
- ngrok
- Terraform
Topics
- Application Delivery
- Application Version Management
- Cloud Native
- GitOps
- Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
- Internal Developer Platforms
- Secrets Management