Jack Henschel's Blog


Jack holding a presentation

Hi, I'm Jack!

I'm a security and cloud computing engineer, tech geek and avid cyclist. I enjoy sharing experiences and knowledge with others by speaking at conferences and blogging about software as well as my outdoor adventures — and some things in between.


#  Latest articles

Creating custom Kubernetes metrics with kube-state-metrics


#  About Me

I currently live in Geneva, Switzerland, where I work at the CERN research organization as a platform engineer on OpenShift Kubernetes clusters: I focus on building a secure, reliable and maintainable platform-as-a-service for our internal users.

My special areas of interest are systems performance, observability and efficiency. Practically, I find myself between development and operations: I like writing software, but if there is already a piece of open-source software that implements it, I prefer integrating those components. Naturally, I am a proponent of DevOps culture and have a strong inclication towards Infrastructure-as-Code and documentation.

In my spare time I enjoy cooking, cycling, hiking and practicing calisthenics. From time-to-time I will also throw in a trail run to mix things up a bit.

I also run my own server for several applications: the blog you are reading right now, Nextcloud (File sharing and groupware), Gitea (Git hosting), ejabberd (XMPP chat) among others. This hobby allows me to practice my skills and experiment with new technologies, such as Kubernetes, Pulumi, Prometheus and others.

I am an advocate of Free, Libre and Open-source software.

Camping at lake Brombachsee, Germany (left).
Junction Hackathon at Aalto University, Finland (right).

#  Career

Between February and August 2021 I was a Thesis worker in the Security Solutions team of Ericsson Finland. Apart from writing my thesis on the topic of Dimensioning, Performance and Optimization of Cloud-native Applications, I was also engaged in the daily activities of software development and server administration.

From January until August 2020 I have been working at Kodit.io as a Junior DevOps Engineer, where I focused on backend software development (Python) and CI/CD.

From 2015 to 2019 I have been working at Fraunhofer-Allianz Vision as a student assistant for administration of Linux systems.

In 2017 I have completed an internship at Nokia Solutions and Networks, where I evaluated two performance monitoring frameworks (SystemTap and Intel PT).

#  Education

In 2021, I completed my Master’s degree in Security and Cloud Computing at Aalto University (Espoo, Finland) and EURECOM (Sophia-Antipolis, France). My Master’s thesis covered the topic of cloud-native applications with a particular focus on autoscaling.

For my Bachelor’s degree I studied Information and Communication technology (a mix between electrical engineering and computer science) at Friedrich-Alexander University (Erlangen, Germany).

Here you can find an overview of my publications.

#  Elsewhere

You can also find me on GitHub, LinkedIn and the Fediverse – check out the buttons below.