I joined Solo.io as EMEA Field CTO on 11 May 2026. One week in. This site is where I'm going to write things down in public as I ramp.

The short version: I'm here because two things are happening at once. Service mesh and API gateway are in the middle of a real shift — Istio Ambient changes the deployment model in a way the sidecar era never could. And alongside that, the agentic AI gateway layer is genuinely brand new — agentgateway, MCP, A2A, the whole pattern of putting policy in front of LLM and tool traffic didn't exist as a category eighteen months ago. I'm excited to be in the middle of that as it lands at customer sites for the first time, rather than reading about it after the fact.

So: notes, labs, opinions. Out in the open as I go.

A quick career detour

For context on where I'm coming into this from.

• DynamicOps — co-founded out of Credit Suisse's R&D division in 2008. Cloud automation before "cloud automation" was a category. Acquired by VMware in July 2012. The product became vRealize Automation and is still shipping today inside Broadcom's VCF as VCF Automation. Fourteen years and counting — that one still makes me smile.
• VMware (2012–2024) — Lead Architect, then Senior Manager, eventually Global Director of Engineering for VMware Development Platform. Built an 80+ person org from zero across nine countries — engineers, SREs, architects, product, programme. Ran the mandated Kubernetes platform underneath VMware's entire SaaS estate at 99.99%. Codified 100+ compliance controls — FedRAMP High, IL5/IL6, HIPAA, PCI, ISO 27001 — directly into the platform so the audit was the platform, not a separate exercise. That period taught me more about Kubernetes-as-a-product than anything else has.
• Broadcom (2024–2026) — Staff 2 Engineer (L6) on VCF Lifecycle Management. Pitched and won executive sign-off on moving the entire VCF product line — vCenter, NSX, Automation — off legacy appliances onto a Kubernetes-native deployment model. Shipped in VCF 9.0 and 9.1. Wrote a lot of Golang, a lot of operators, a lot of Argo Workflows.
• WeaveONE (2026–present) — founded earlier this year. An AI-assisted service helping UK families and schools navigate the EHCP process for children with special educational needs. RAG over the legislation and statutory guidance, PII redaction designed in from the start because the platform handles children's medical records. Built end-to-end with Claude Code. I'll keep running this alongside Solo — it matters to me.
• Solo.io (May 2026–present) — Field CTO for EMEA. Where you find me now.

Two granted patents along the way — one on lifecycle management for virtual compute templates, one on a Kubernetes change-management system. Speaker at VMExplore and VMware's internal R&D conference. Hands-on full-stack across Golang, Java, Python and TypeScript. The reason I mention any of that isn't the trophy cabinet — it's that I've spent the last decade-plus running platforms that have to actually work, for real customers, with real compliance pressure. That's the lens I bring to Solo's stack.

Why this site exists

My mission at Solo is to help the European region adopt two things:

• The cloud connectivity stack — Istio (ambient and sidecar), kgateway as the API gateway, Solo Enterprise on top. Where ambient changes the east-west picture and the gateway story stops being NGINX-and-pray.
• The agentic stack — agentgateway, kagent, agentregistry. Where MCP, A2A and tool-calling stop being a demo and start being something a regulated enterprise can actually run.

I learn best by building. So instead of writing customer slides and forgetting what I figured out, I'm building it on this site — labs you can run on kind, reference pages I wish had existed when I was first chasing a topic, and posts when there's something worth saying that doesn't fit either of those.

Three kinds of content sit alongside each other on the top nav:

• Labs — full standups and walkthroughs. Standup ones spin up the infrastructure; application ones run a scenario on top. All idempotent, all on kind, all on my laptop.
• Knowledge base & musings — reference pages, decision pages, visual maps of CRDs and wire formats. The pages I keep coming back to.
• Blog — this. Shorter. Less polished. Field notes, the occasional opinion, what changed in the last week.

A note on what this is and isn't

This is a personal site. I'm a new hire at Solo and I'll get things wrong as I work through the stack — expect rough edges, expect me to circle back and correct things. None of this is an official Solo property and nothing here speaks for Solo. The disclaimer on the home page covers it properly.

If you spot something that's wrong, or you want to push back on a take, I'd rather hear it than not.

What's queued up

Things sitting in the drafts folder right now:

• Notes from week one — what surprised me about the Solo stack coming in from VMware and Broadcom.
• A field guide to MCP security and governance with agentgateway — already up on the Knowledge tab, but I want to write the why-this-page-exists story behind it.
• Why ambient changes the east-west threat model, not just the wire format.
• kgateway vs Istio Ingress Gateway — when each one actually wins.

If any of that sounds useful, the RSS link below catches new posts as they land. Otherwise I'll see you in the next one.