I’m Ivan Gjakovikj, a platform and DevOps engineer in Skopje, North Macedonia. I run production Kubernetes on Azure, mostly AKS.
Four years of that now. The first three were at MECOMS, keeping clusters alive for European utilities. I cut cluster cost by over 50% by right sizing, cut monitoring spend by 60% by replacing Log Analytics with self hosted Loki and Grafana, and removed stored service principal secrets with Workload Identity.
Now I’m at IWConnect, building and running a multi tenant AI platform on AKS: LiteLLM, Langfuse, ArgoCD, Postgres and the rest of the stack.
I studied dentistry first and taught myself the rest. I passed the CKA with 88%.
What I use: Kubernetes, AKS, Terraform, Helm, ArgoCD, Grafana, Loki, Azure, GitLab CI, Azure DevOps.
Why this blog exists: the gap between vendor documentation and what happens when you run something in production is enormous, and almost nobody writes about it. No affiliate links, no sponsored content, no “Top 10 tips” listicles. Just the things I would want to read myself.