About
I’m Vlad Mocanu, a Senior Platform Engineer based in Romania. 20+ years in infrastructure/operations.
Currently: Platform Engineer at METAMINDS, helping teams adopt Kubernetes and Cloud Native technologies.
Community: Organizer of Cloud Native Days Romania. Managed to bring Viktor Farcic and Whitney Lee as keynote speakers for the 2026 edition — still can’t believe it.
The Journey
Started as Linux Sysadmin in 2005, spent about 7 years working for Rompetrol, eventually led a team of 5 Sysadmins at EveryMatrix. Joined Pond5 in 2017 (later acquired by Shutterstock) — all infra was in AWS, so I had to quickly pick up cloud skills and made the mental shift into DevOps philosophy and platform engineering. Been all-in on Kubernetes since 2021.
KubeCon Amsterdam 2023 was my first — felt like a kid in a candy store. Skipped most talks, couldn’t leave the booth area. Spent the whole time talking to speakers, developers, the people who actually build the stuff I use daily. That was my biggest takeaway. Also met my #1 influencers Viktor Farcic (DevOps Toolkit) and Whitney Lee (whitneylee.com) in person. Been attending every European KubeCon since.
The Homelab
Ever since I discovered Linux, I’ve always had a Linux box (once FreeBSD) as a homelab and test playground. The infra grew over time as my hunger to test out new things grew.
What started as “I should learn Kubernetes” turned into a 3-node Proxmox cluster running 90+ applications. It’s my playground for testing ideas — many of which become real implementations at work.
Passions
Linux — Started in the early 2000s. Spent countless nights reading, testing, debugging. My first install had no GPU drivers, no sound — didn’t care. I was hooked.
Kubernetes — Felt the same way when I discovered it. Both Linux and Kubernetes are foundations for building platforms and solutions. Same energy, different era.
Agentic AI — The latest obsession. Always felt like I needed to hire someone to help manage the ever-growing homelab. Then I found Claude Code. Done huge migrations and implementations that would’ve taken forever — or projects I wouldn’t have even started. Too much manual work, stuff that can’t be easily automated. Now I have a teammate that is never tired.
Honorable mention: Internal Developer Platforms — Always believed DevOps engineers (I know it is a philosophy and not a job title) shouldn’t become the bottleneck that sysadmins once were for developers. When IDPs became a thing (BACK Stack), it clicked. I think of them as custom-tailored cloud consoles — just like AWS/GCP abstracts infrastructure, IDPs offer golden paths and self-service for devs without drowning in operational complexity or waiting on Ops team.
Connect
Always happy to geek out about Kubernetes, homelab/self-hosting, or cloud native tech—feel free to reach out.
About This Blog
Built with Hugo + Hextra, hosted on GitHub Pages, CI/CD via Forgejo Actions. More about the setup →.