Viam inveniam, aut faciam.
(I'll find a way, or I'll make one.)
I'm Nik Ogura — distinguished engineer, infrastructure architect, and security practitioner. I build platforms, tools, and systems that work superlatively. I've spent my career making Kubernetes, observability, and security infrastructure that teams actually want to use.
Currently I run KATN Solutions, helping companies build enterprise-grade infrastructure their teams can own.
This site is where I write about the things I've learned, the tools I've built, and the opinions I've formed along the way. Browse my open source projects or read my writing.
Projects
Dex SSH Connector
Fork of Dex OIDC identity provider adding an SSH connector for SSH-key-based authentication to Kubernetes clusters.
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kubectl-ssh-oidc
Kubernetes CLI plugin for passwordless, SSH-key-based cluster authentication via OIDC.
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RBAC Expiry Operator
Kubernetes operator for time-limited RBAC grants with automatic expiration, drift correction, and Prometheus metrics.
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Diagnostic Slackbot
AI-powered Slack bot for automated infrastructure diagnostics, analyzing WAF logs, Kubernetes events, and system metrics.
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Writing
Control Repositories
A control repository is a git repository whose contents declare what should be running, intended to be reconciled by an automated controller. It looks like a source repo, but the discipline is different — reviews focus on what the system should be, duplication is often intentional, and the head of main is the state of the platform right now.
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Trunk-Based Development
Long-running branches are an anti-pattern. The longer a branch is open, the more expensive the integration becomes, the less informative the diff, and the further the branch drifts from whatever is actually shipping. Trunk-based development is the alternative the continuous delivery community converged on two decades ago, and the evidence for it is overwhelming.
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Security Is Infrastructure
Security and infrastructure are not two disciplines that happen to overlap. They are one discipline that companies have artificially separated because org charts demand clean boxes and job postings demand clean titles.
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Metrics, Logs, Traces, and Events: What's Actually Different
Four observability signals that get thrown around interchangeably. Understanding what makes each one distinct and where they overlap determines whether your observability stack scales or collapses under its own weight.
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GitOps
GitOps is not just keeping YAML in git. It is a specific operational model where a controller in the cluster continuously reconciles actual state against desired state declared in a git repository, providing audit trail, reproducibility, drift correction, and safe rollback.
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FluxCD vs ArgoCD: Architectural Comparison
A deep comparison of the architectural differences between FluxCD and ArgoCD for experienced Kubernetes platform engineers, covering CRD design, state management, controller models, and where each tool wins.
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