JK

Jacob Knapp

Senior Cloud Engineer · Cigna · Minneapolis

I'm a cloud engineer at Cigna, where I help build and run the Kubernetes platforms our engineering teams deploy on. Most of my spare time goes to the homelab, automating things that probably didn't need automating.

What I work with

Runtime
Kubernetes on EKS, OpenShift, and k3s
Infrastructure
Terraform, OpenTofu, Ansible
Delivery
Argo CD, Flux, Helm
Observability
Prometheus, Grafana
Secrets
Vault, plus more PKI than most people want to hear about

The path here

Now
Cloud Engineering Senior Advisor, Cigna — Kubernetes platform engineering
Before
Lead Analyst, IT Web Delivery Services, 3M
School
B.S. Computer Science, Grand Valley State University

The homelab

There's a rack in my basement running a smaller version of what I do at work. Every host, container, and certificate on it comes out of a git repo, mostly because I've learned the hard way what happens when they don't.

The hypervisors and the machines on them are described in OpenTofu and configured with Ansible, so anything I lose is an afternoon of rebuilding instead of an evening of remembering. Deploys go through my own Gitea and a runner that reconciles the compose stacks. I try hard not to SSH into a box to change it, which is a rule I keep about ninety percent of the time.

The secrets plumbing has taken the most evenings. A private certificate authority issues every internal certificate, and Vault hands the applications database credentials that expire before I can forget about them, so nothing down there is running on a password I typed. Getting there meant a couple of self-inflicted outages I'd rather not describe in detail.

Monitoring is wired to a small agent that tries the obvious fix before it wakes me up: restart the container, re-render the config, check whether a certificate quietly expired over the weekend. It is right often enough to be worth the evenings it cost.

A few dozen services run on it, most of them behind single sign-on. I self-host instead of paying for managed ones. Partly to learn, partly stubbornness.

Get in touch

I'm not actively looking, but I'm easy to find. Always up for shop talk about Kubernetes or homelabs.