Vishnu KS is an end-to-end engineer based in Kochi, Kerala, India. He builds applications, scalable cloud infrastructure, DevOps pipelines, security controls, Kubernetes platforms, observability systems, and AI integrations. He is a KCD Kochi organiser, CNCF Kerala community leader, and Top 3% global talent verified by Toptal.

What is Vishnu KS available for?

Vishnu KS is available for application engineering, cloud architecture, DevOps automation, Kubernetes platforms, security controls, production debugging, advisory roles, architecture reviews, and speaking opportunities via Topmate at https://topmate.io/iamvishnuks.

What open source projects has Vishnu KS built?

Vishnu KS has built XReplicator (an eBPF-powered VM backup engine), OpsBrew (a Kubernetes log pipeline tool that won the Microsoft Azure Sentinel Hackathon), eBee (an interactive eBPF learning platform), AudioNet (audio classification using TensorFlow), and XMigrate (an open-source VM portability platform).

What is SRE Chronicles?

SRE Chronicles is a technical blog by Vishnu KS featuring real production incident investigations written as narrative stories. Each chapter covers a real debugging investigation - the alert, the hunt, the discovery, the fix, and the lessons. Available at https://iamvishnuks.com/chronicles.

Is Vishnu KS a Kubernetes expert?

Yes. Vishnu KS has extensive Kubernetes expertise spanning platform engineering at fleet scale, GitOps with ArgoCD, eBPF-level observability with Cilium, multi-tenant Loki/Grafana stacks, and deep incident investigation. He is also the organiser of KCD Kochi 2026 - Kerala's flagship Kubernetes Community Days event.

Incident Case Files · Production Debugging · Systems Notes

Production Debugging Archive

Incident
Case Files

Real incidents. Real debugging. Real lessons. Each chapter is a story from the trenches — the kind of production problems that don't show up in documentation, only in 2am alerts and packet captures.

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Case 01

The 5-Second Time Bomb

Every Node.js server ships with a silent misconfiguration. Most never notice it - until nginx does.

SymptomIntermittent 502 after idle upstream connections

SystemNode.js / nginx / Kubernetes

Read8 min read / Apr 2025

Node.js / nginx / Kubernetes / TCP

Case 02

CF-RAY: -

curl from the pod worked. The app from the same pod did not. Cloudflare returned a 400 for a request it pretended never existed.

SymptomCloudflare 400 with no Ray ID

SystemJava / Spring / Cloudflare

Read9 min read / May 2026

Cloudflare / Java / SOAP / TLS

Case 03

The Ghost Connections

A Java service was taking 21 seconds to call an API that responded in 179ms. The wire logs exonerated everyone.

Symptom21s call for a 179ms upstream

SystemApache HC5 / Camel / Kafka

Read10 min read / May 2026

Apache HC5 / Camel / Kafka / Java

Case 04

Guilty by Association

Checkpoint was blocking the right IP for the wrong reason. The domain it showed wasn't ours. The IP was shared with thousands of others.

SymptomIntermittent connection resets on a Cloudflare-fronted endpoint

SystemCheckpoint Firewall / Cloudflare / AKS

Read8 min read / May 2026

Checkpoint / Cloudflare / Firewall / Networking