THE ENGINEERING JOURNAL

THALAMUS / ENGINEERING FIELD NOTES

About

Who writes Thalamus, the background in platform engineering, and why it's named after the brain's relay hub.

Hi friend, I’m Karén.

I’m a Principal Platform & DevOps Engineer and Cloud Architect with over 17 years of hands-on experience designing, scaling, and operating critical infrastructure. My focus centers on Kubernetes platform design, GitOps continuous delivery, cloud architecture, PKI hierarchies, and production reliability.

Why Thalamus?

In neuroanatomy, the thalamus (from Greek θάλαμος, “inner chamber”) is the large mass of gray matter situated in the dorsal part of the diencephalon. It acts as the brain’s primary relay hub—processing, filtering, and directing sensory and motor signals to the cerebral cortex.

In platform engineering, modern infrastructure plays the exact same role: a reliable, high-throughput relay connecting applications, databases, delivery pipelines, and networks.

This site serves as my public engineering journal: complete setups, architecture notes, operational field lessons, and the architectural trade-offs behind resilient platforms.

Professional Focus

  • Platform Architecture & Kubernetes: Production cluster design, on-premise and cloud (AWS EKS, bare-metal), networking with MetalLB/Calico, ingress, and multi-tenant workload isolation.
  • Continuous Delivery & GitOps: Declarative pipelines, automated image promotion, artifact governance, and deployment validation.
  • Security & PKI: Certificate authorities (CFSSL hierarchies), mutual TLS, and secret management.
  • Linux Systems Engineering: Performance tuning, kernel parameters, container runtimes (containerd), and automation.

You can find my career history and technical background on LinkedIn.

Certifications

Selected AWS and Google Cloud certifications, with issuer verification on Credly.

Amazon Web Services Training and Certification AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional Expires Verify on Credly Google Cloud Professional Cloud Architect Certification Expires Verify on Credly Amazon Web Services Training and Certification AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate Expires Verify on Credly Google Cloud Associate Cloud Engineer Certification Expires Verify on Credly

View all certifications and skill badges on Credly.

About this notebook

These notes document practical work with infrastructure and delivery systems. Older articles retain their original publication dates and are marked when their commands and software versions still need review.

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For feedback or a professional conversation, connect with me on LinkedIn.