#012 – Kubernetes for Humans Podcast with Hans Kristian Flaatten (NAV)

Itiel Shwartz: Hello, everyone. Happy to have you back. My name is Itiel Shwartz, and I’m the CTO and co-founder of Komodor. With me today on the Kubernetes for Humans podcast, we have Hans from NAV. Hans, do you want to introduce yourself?

Hans Kristian Flaatten: Hi, thanks for having me. I’m Hans from the Norwegian government, or NAV. We are the Labor and Welfare Administration, responsible for social services in Norway. We actually handle one-third of the Norwegian annual budget, so it’s quite a large operation—the single largest government agency in Norway. We’ve been on our cloud-native journey for the past eight years. It’s been a long journey, but we’re still trying to get even better. I’m super excited to be here.

Itiel Shwartz: I’m super happy to have you. Before we talk about the Norwegian government and everything, could you share a bit about yourself? How did you start developing and getting into infrastructure? What’s your journey?

Hans Kristian Flaatten: Sure. I have a long history of working with open source. I started back in high school, creating a community for my classmates, just before Facebook came along. When Facebook launched, everyone left my platform.

Itiel Shwartz: That must have been an interesting start to development.

Hans Kristian Flaatten: It was! In a desperate attempt to get them back, I made a copy of Facebook’s theme and actually received a cease and desist letter. I was a bit scared at the time, but now it’s all in good humor. From there, I studied computer science at the Norwegian Technical University. Alongside my studies, I’ve always been into hiking—I grew up in the Norwegian mountains. I combined my passion for technology and hiking by working for the Norwegian Trekking Association, where I created a hiking map for all of Norway.

I was half of the IT department there, so I had to automate a lot of processes, like test automation and deployment automation. We didn’t call it DevOps back then, but that’s essentially what it was. We got into containers very early on. After that, I joined a large consultancy agency in Norway, where I continued to champion DevOps and Kubernetes. I worked with various government agencies, including the Directorate of Fisheries, where I started building a minimal viable platform for a few applications. This platform eventually gained traction and became widely adopted.

Itiel Shwartz: That’s an amazing journey. It sounds like you had a lot of freedom in your previous roles. Did you encounter any resistance when trying to onboard new teams onto the platform?

Hans Kristian Flaatten: There were some doubts within the organization, but we didn’t force anyone. We focused on getting the early adopters on board and let them share their success stories with their peers. It was a gradual process, and once we reached a critical mass, it became clear that the platform was here to stay. We didn’t know if we would end up being the only platform within the Directorate, but we knew we had enough traction that it wouldn’t be shut down.

Itiel Shwartz: You mentioned using a DSL (Domain-Specific Language) for deployment. How do you handle situations where the application doesn’t work as expected? Does the developer know what’s happening behind the scenes?

Hans Kristian Flaatten: Excellent point. We try to advocate for simpler architectures to avoid complexity. But when issues arise, we don’t have a silver bullet. We’re working on a developer portal that translates common errors into actionable insights. We haven’t tried to obfuscate Kubernetes entirely—they still have access to it if they need to interact directly with their namespaces.

Itiel Shwartz: Let’s talk about responsibilities between platforms, SRE, and developers. Who wakes up in the middle of the night when something goes wrong?

Hans Kristian Flaatten: Most of our operations happen during normal working hours, so there’s not much need for middle-of-the-night alerts. We do have legacy applications with traditional Dev and Ops setups, but for the majority, it’s best effort from the application teams. The platform team is only responsible for the platform itself. If something affects the entire platform, we’re paged. But if it’s just one application, the application team handles it.

Itiel Shwartz: It sounds like a well-thought-out system. Can you share a bit about your platform, Nice.io, and how other organizations are using it?

Hans Kristian Flaatten: Absolutely. Nice.io is a Kubernetes platform with an application operator that provides the DSL for developers. It’s open source by default, as long as it doesn’t contain sensitive information. We’ve even managed to migrate from Istio to Linkerd without developers noticing, thanks to our operator. We’ve also onboarded other government agencies onto our platform, providing them with independent instances managed by us. It’s still in the pilot phase, but it’s an exciting way to share resources across government organizations.

Itiel Shwartz: That’s really impressive. Do you see any interesting trends or predictions for the future?

Hans Kristian Flaatten: Predicting the future is always tricky, but I believe we’re not going back from platforming and giving developers more responsibility for their applications. We’re looking into open telemetry for observability, and possibly exploring WebAssembly for serverless applications. The Kubernetes API is here to stay, whether it’s for containers or other forms of computing. Additionally, there’s a growing focus on cost savings and environmental impact, like turning off development environments when they’re not in use.

Itiel Shwartz: It sounds like you’re ahead of the curve. It was a real pleasure having you on the podcast, Hans. This was one of the most interesting and different conversations I’ve had.

Hans Kristian Flaatten: Thank you for having me. I hope I can come back at some point and share more.

Itiel Shwartz: I’d be happy to have you back.

[Music]

Hans Kristian Flaatten does Platform Engineering at the Norwegian Labour and Welfare Administration (NAV) responsible for the NAIS platform. NAIS is an application platform built to increase development speed by providing our developers at NAV with the best possible tools to develop and run their applications.

Previously Chief Consultant and DevOps Practice Lead for TietoEVRY where he drove culture and competency building for DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), and Cloud Native practices internally and for customers in public government, telecom, banking, and insurance sectors.

Itiel Shwartz is CTO and co-founder of Komodor, a company building the next-gen Kubernetes management platform for Engineers.

Worked at eBay, Forter, and Rookout as the first developer.

Backend & Infra developer turned ‘DevOps’, an avid public speaker who loves talking about infrastructure, Kubernetes, Python observability, and the evolution of R&D culture.  He is also the host of the Kubernetes for Humans Podcast. 

Please note: This transcript was generated using automatic transcription software. While we strive for accuracy, there may be slight discrepancies between the text and the audio. For the most precise understanding, we recommend listening to the podcast episode