In late 2024, customers and prospects were eager to run Kubernetes on Oxide, but we had no supported integrations to help them do it. Kubernetes and Oxide are a natural fit. Kubernetes defines the infrastructure behavior it expects through standard extension points, while Oxide exposes the primitives needed to implement that behavior through APIs. The foundation for integration was there. What was missing was the software and an understanding of which integrations customers actually needed. That was the situation when I joined Oxide as its first Solutions Software Engineer, [ 1 ] focused on building software to solve customer problems. My first assignment was to make it easier to deploy and operate Kubernetes on Oxide. In my first week, I was handed two resources to help me get started: A customer-submitted pull request for a Rancher node driver An early draft of RFD 493 Initial Kubernetes Integrations What began with those two resources grew into a team effort shaped by a feedback loop.…