I'm Leslie Cordell — Principal Consultant and Platform Engineer. I help Norwegian businesses build secure, scalable and cost-effective infrastructure on Kubernetes and Azure.
Cluster design and setup — AKS, multi-node-pool, system/user isolation, spot nodes for tolerant workloads, secure network design with Azure CNI and private cluster.
GitOps with Argo CD — everything in the cluster declared in Git, automatic sync policies, app-of-apps, safe rollbacks and full traceability on every change.
Service mesh and traffic management — Istio for mTLS, fine-grained traffic splitting, canary rollouts, and visibility into who talks to whom.
Policy and security — Kyverno policies that block insecure configurations at admission, pod security standards, image signing and scanning.
Observability — Prometheus, Grafana, Loki and OpenTelemetry. Dashboards that actually answer the questions your team is asking.
Cost management — KEDA for scale-to-zero, right-sizing, budget alerts, and a monthly cost report that's easy to read.
Disaster recovery — Velero backups, multi-region strategy, and documented runbooks for when something does go wrong.
Reduction in annual infrastructure cost — without compromise on performance or delivery speed.
Read the full storyOften not. If you have one or two services and modest traffic, Azure Container Apps or App Service is a simpler and cheaper route. Kubernetes pays off from five to ten services and up, or when you have specific needs around portability, fine-grained traffic management or policy. I'm happy to recommend Kubernetes only when something else doesn't fit better.
A foundation — cluster, GitOps, observability, security and a first application in production — is usually 3–6 weeks. After that we add features at the team's pace, not before.
The latter. The goal is for your team to own the platform. I deliver code, documentation and training, and provide handover support — but no permanent dependency.
Very common. I usually start with a short assessment (2–4 weeks), deliver a written report with prioritised actions, and help carry them out. It's rarely necessary to start over.
Whether it's a platform to build from scratch or an existing setup that needs to be safer and more cost-efficient — get in touch for a no-obligation conversation.