Kubernetes Storage, Observability & the Next 10 Years
Mar 10, 2026
You're running Kubernetes workloads, but resource allocation is still a guessing game — too much and you waste money, too little and performance suffers.
Amin Astaneh, SRE/DevOps Consultant at Certo Modo, shares how AI-powered resource optimization could finally take that guessing game off your plate — and why giving engineers full control over storage provisioning is a trap.
In this interview:
Why resource optimization by AI is the Kubernetes tool Amin is most excited about
How to balance developer self-service with operator guardrails for storage
Why you should use service level objectives and the USE Method instead of building storage-only dashboards
What the next 10 years of Kubernetes needs: fewer choices, better defaults, and a happy path
Relevant links
Transcription
Bart Farrell: Who are you? What's your role? Where do you work?
Amin Astaneh: Hey, I'm Amin Astaneh. I'm an instructor for LearnKube. I'm also a consultant for Certo Modo, my business.
Bart Farrell: What are three emerging Kubernetes tools that you're keeping an eye on?
Amin Astaneh: I'm particularly interested in resource optimization, preferably by AI. It would be awesome if it was automatic.
Bart Farrell: What's your take on the trade-off between using cloud-native storage like EBS versus bringing your own storage layer? Have you found the vendor lock-in risk worth worrying about in practice? What's your philosophy on developer self-service for infrastructure? Should storage provisioning be completely automated and developer controlled? Or do you think some gatekeeping prevents bigger problems down the road?
Amin Astaneh: There needs to be a balance. We need to give engineers the ability to make some decisions about what type of storage that they need. But you don't want to give them all of the choices because they'll go hog wild, of course. I think there needs to be a balance between the operator and the engineer, just like anything else.
Bart Farrell: How much storage observability is enough in your opinion? Do you think having VM or container level storage metrics actually help solve problems? Or does it just create more dashboards nobody looks at?
Amin Astaneh: Storage metrics. Typically, you're not going to be building a dashboard with just your storage metrics on it because you're never going to look at it. I prefer to look at service level objectives, the top level metrics in terms of the performance of the system, and then allow your USE Method utilization saturation errors for your storage to help explain the performance of your application. So don't just make a dashboard, but use that information to explain the performance of your app.
Bart Farrell: Kubernetes turned 10 years old last year. What can we expect in the next 10 years?
Amin Astaneh: Well, hopefully a standardization around best practices. There's a whole lot of tools and a whole lot of ways to solve your problem. Hopefully we can give engineers and operations people a happy path to being able to get up and running quickly.
Bart Farrell: What's next for you?
Amin Astaneh: What's next for me? Well, I'm going to go hang out with Salman. We're going to be doing YAML games as well as looking for fun opportunities and fun companies to help.