About Jonathan Bouligny

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I am a Platform and Infrastructure Engineer based in Austin, Texas, with 6+ years of experience designing, automating, and operating enterprise Linux platforms at Red Hat and Lockheed Martin.

I hold the Red Hat Certified Architect (RHCA) in Ansible credential and specialize in building deterministic, reproducible systems from the bare hypervisor up using Terraform, Ansible, Kubernetes (k3s/OpenShift), and GitOps (Argo CD).

What I’m Building Now: Fleet Platform

My current flagship engineering project is fleet-platform—a fully reproducible, GitOps-managed Kubernetes platform deployed on a self-hosted 3-node Proxmox cluster (40 cores, 157 GB RAM).

Phase 2, Part 1: cert-manager, Rate Limits, and the Restore Race

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Note on Build Chronology: This devlog was started mid-flight during the cert-manager & ingress milestone. Foundational build logs for Phase 0 (two-node k3s bootstrap) and Phase 1 (Proxmox/Terraform/Ansible) are currently being backfilled.

cert-manager

Setting up cert-manager was pretty easy with a Helm chart. I did spend a lot of time on this step but it was mostly googling and figuring out what to do about bootstrap secrets which I detail below. The most interesting thing I learned was part of the values file, specifically installCRDs (or crds.enabled, depending on chart version). CRDs, Custom Resource Definitions, are objects that teach the Kubernetes API server about new kinds of resources, like Certificate and ClusterIssuer. They’re not backed by Go directly, they’re schema definitions, and a controller (cert-manager’s own pod, running Go code) is what actually watches for objects of that kind and acts on them. So a CRD without its controller running is just an inert schema. The controller is the operator, the CRD is the vocabulary it teaches the cluster.

Jon's Devlog

About Jonathan Bouligny

What I’m Building Now: Fleet Platform

Phase 2, Part 1: cert-manager, Rate Limits, and the Restore Race

cert-manager