Hi, I'm James.
👋 I’m a software engineer, speaker, and technical author specialising in cloud native software, distributed systems, security, and networking. I’m an author of the book Cilium: Up and Running (O’Reilly), and I’ve spoken at KubeCon and many other conferences about my work.
Currently I’m a principal customer success architect, Isovalent at Cisco. I’ve previously worked at Jetstack as a staff solutions engineer, and an engineer in fintech before that.
I’m an active contributor to both Kubernetes and Cilium.
I was previously a member of the Kubernetes release team from Kubernetes v1.18 though v1.24, culminating in being the release lead for Kubernetes v1.24 Stargazer
ðŸ”.
I’ve also served as the emeritus adviser for Kubernetes v1.27 Chill Vibes
🦥.
My pronouns are he/him/his.
Contact
Speaking & Writing
High-Scale Networking for ML Workloads with Cilium talk at Cloud Native Rejekts Europe 2025
How Minecraft Took Center Stage Instead of eBPF podcast for Giant Conversations
Building an Application-Specific Container Image Builder talk at Kubernetes Community Days UK 2024
Episode 136: How Does eBPF Actually Work? livestream for eBPF & Cilium Office Hours (eCHO)
How eBPF Actually Works talk at Cloud Native Rejekts Europe 2024
Episode 117: A Tour of the Cilium Helm Values livestream for eBPF & Cilium Office Hours (eCHO)
eBPF and Kubernetes — Better Together! Observability and Security with Tetragon talk at Kubernetes Community Days UK 2023
Talking to Kubernetes with Rust lightning talk at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2023
Enterprise Security at 3:12am: Why You Should Use a Security Key blog for Jetstack (archived copy)
Rust Nation UK 2023 blog for Jetstack (archived copy)
Building Operators for Legacy Software or: Running Minecraft on Kubernetes talk at Kubernetes London
In Clouds We Trust talk at Kubernetes Community Days UK 2022
Announcing Jetstack Paranoia: A New Open Source Tool for Container Image Security blog for Jetstack (archived copy)
Building Operators for Legacy Software or: Running Minecraft on Kubernetes talk at KubeHuddle 2022
Stargazing, solutions and staycations: the Kubernetes 1.24 release interview blog for Kubernetes
Written transcript of my Kubernetes Podcast interview
The Wonderful World of Kubernetes Upstream talk at Bristol Cloud Native & DevOps
Kubernetes and the Cloud Native Community interview for The New Stack
Kubernetes 1.24 Release webinar for The Cloud Native Computing Foundation
Jetstack at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2022 Europe blog for Jetstack (archived copy)
Kubernetes 1.24, with James Laverack podcast for The Kubernetes Podcast from Google
Kubernetes 1.24 Drops Dockershim, Makes Space for Stateful Workloads interview for The New Stack
Dockershim deprecated with release of Kubernetes 1.24 interview for The Register
Kubernetes 1.24 Release Arrives to Finally Deprecate Dockershim interview for Container Journal
Kubernetes 1.24: Stargazer blog for Kubernetes
Kubernetes users brace for major change that reduces Docker’s impact interview for Protocol
Life as a Solutions Engineer blog for Jetstack (archived copy)
Looking Ahead to Kubernetes 1.24 blog for Jetstack (archived copy)
Kubernetes 1.22 Release webinar for The Cloud Native Computing Foundation
Kubernetes 1.22 livestream for Red Hat Cloud Tech Tuesdays
Kubernetes Release Cadence Change blog for Kubernetes
Kubernetes Operators in Depth blog for InfoQ (archived copy)
A Kubernetes Operator for etcd talk at QCon London 2020
Automating Toil by Lying to Your Boss’s Slack Bot talk at Google Developer Group Bristol