Jonas Govaerts · Herenthout, Belgium
Technical Lead
& Architect
I design, build and operate Red Hat OpenShift platforms on bare metal for telecom operators. At Telenet I architected the OpenShift platform for virtualised network functions and built its installer automation and GitOps model.
- Current role
- Senior Telco Cloud Engineer, Telenet
- Focus
- OpenShift on bare metal, GitOps, telco networking
- Working with OpenShift since
- 2019
- Certification
- Red Hat Certified Specialist in OpenShift Administration
Skills
Red Hat OpenShift
- Bare-metal installs with the agent-based installer
- Day-2 operations: MachineSets, MachineConfigs, PerformanceProfiles
- Operators: Virtualization, SR-IOV, NMState, Data Foundation
- Red Hat Quay, OpenShift 3 and 4
GitOps and automation
- OpenShift GitOps (Argo CD), app-of-apps
- Kustomize and Helm
- Flux CD
- Terraform and Ansible
Networking and storage
- OVN-Kubernetes, Cilium, Calico
- SR-IOV, DPDK, LACP bonding
- Ceph and Data Foundation, HPE CSI
- Backup with OADP and Velero
Security and observability
- cert-manager, External Secrets Operator
- OIDC single sign-on and RBAC
- OpenShift Logging, Splunk, Elastic
- OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana
Kubernetes and tooling
- Kubernetes, Google Anthos, GKE
- GitLab CI/CD and Jenkins
- Bash, Python and Go
- HPE ProLiant, iLO Redfish, MAAS, RHEL
Architecture and leadership
- Platform architecture and design
- Technical roadmaps and standards
- Mentoring and code review
- Working with product teams, operations and vendors
Experience
Senior Telco Cloud Engineer
Apr 2022 – presentOpenShift platform
- Architected the OpenShift 4 platform for virtualised network functions on HPE bare metal.
- Built the install automation around the agent-based installer, with gomplate templates, Bash and one variable file per cluster.
- Automated node boot through HPE iLO Redfish virtual media. Added day-2 worker scale-out with the Bare Metal Operator.
- Designed the cluster network: compact three-node control planes, OVN-Kubernetes, and LACP bonds and storage networks set through NMState.
- Bootstrapped OpenShift GitOps (Argo CD) with single sign-on group RBAC and a least-privilege controller role.
- Set up the GitOps repository model: an app-of-apps repository per cluster and a repository per reusable component.
- Deployed and configured operators through Argo CD: OpenShift Virtualization, SR-IOV, Data Foundation, HPE CSI, OADP, cert-manager, External Secrets and OpenShift Logging.
- Wrote shared GitLab CI templates that track upstream operator releases and tag component versions.
Kubernetes and bare-metal automation
- Designed a self-service portal on MAAS where telco cloud customers provision bare-metal servers.
- Wrote Kubernetes Operators on Google Anthos to onboard and deploy 5G cloud-native network functions (CNFs).
- Automated the HPE hardware lifecycle: firmware upgrades, bare-metal provisioning and capacity planning.
- Configured SR-IOV and DPDK for low-latency telco workloads.
- Review merge requests and agree platform conventions with the team.
OpenShift Engineer
Apr 2019 – Mar 2022- Operated the multi-tenant OpenShift 3 and 4 platform used by internal development teams.
- Designed and deployed a highly available Red Hat Quay registry for the platform.
- Introduced GitOps with Argo CD for platform and application deployments.
- Wrote runbooks and platform standards, and mentored engineers on day-2 operations.
Networks and Telephony Operations Engineer
Jun 2017 – Apr 2019- Built Splunk dashboards and Python scripts for preventive maintenance.
- Operated the platforms behind emergency call services, including on-call duty.
Selected projects
Bare-metal OpenShift for network functions
Architecture and install automation for OpenShift 4 on HPE ProLiant servers. A script renders the agent-based installer configuration from a variable file, builds the ISO and boots the nodes through Redfish virtual media. Performance tuning and worker scale-out follow as day-2 steps.
GitOps for OpenShift clusters
Each cluster has an app-of-apps repository that pulls in reusable component repositories built with Kustomize. Argo CD installs the operators in sync waves, and patches set the values per environment. CI scans every change for leaked secrets.
Highly available Red Hat Quay
Designed and deployed Red Hat Quay in a highly available setup. It served as the container image registry for the development teams on the multi-tenant OpenShift platform.
5G CNF onboarding on Anthos
Custom Kubernetes Operators that onboard and deploy 5G cloud-native network functions on Google Anthos. SR-IOV and DPDK provide the low-latency networking these workloads require.
Certifications
Education
Bachelor in IT, Systems and Network Administration
Thomas More Hogeschool · 2013–2016
Specialisation in Linux systems administration and computer networking.
Contact
Open to new projects in OpenShift, Kubernetes and platform engineering. Send a message through the form or by email.