About

Vladimir Mikhalev

Docker Captain  ·  CNCF Ambassador  ·  IBM Champion  ·  AWS Community Builder

What I Do#

One of fewer than 250 Docker Captains worldwide. 10 vendor community titles — earned through contribution, not credentials.

I test what the industry ships — and publish what I find. Production-tested frameworks for container security, AI governance, and platform engineering. Every framework is tested on infrastructure I run: a fleet of 70+ public templates that boot, upgrade and restore in CI daily, and two home servers.

Evidence#

Green is a claim. A restore is evidence.

Recognition#

Docker CEO on my contributions to the ecosystem

“Vladimir has written more than 100 pieces of content for Docker in the past year. He has also helped us find customer stories that we’ve been able to document and share throughout the rest of the community. And he’s met with multiple product managers internally to share his product feedback.”


— Scott Johnston, CEO, Docker (2019–2025)

Published Work#

Selected publications on vendor platforms


Production Background#

Where the decisions come from

I build the platforms, run the company-wide systems on top of them, and am the sole IT and DevOps engineer for North America. I run the infrastructure that my frameworks are tested against — container orchestration, zero trust governance, AI-augmented platform engineering, multi-region cloud architecture on AWS.

Earlier: operations and support roles at IBM, IPONWEB, Amazon and Thales (2016–2019).

Every recommendation I publish is backed by production experience. Not theory.


Architecture Decisions#

How production experience translates to architecture decisions

I make architecture decisions for enterprise infrastructure spanning Prague and Toronto — vendor evaluation for container platforms, migration planning from on-premises VMware to AWS EKS, and cost optimization through container-first deployment strategies. I wrote the Docker case study documenting a retailer’s 25% cost savings from container-first development.


Customer-Facing & Enablement#

Technical enablement, workshops, and stakeholder communication

I deliver customer-facing technical content across vendor platforms — Docker Official Blog publications function as enablement material for container adoption, and 3 articles for Cypress on DEV serve as workshop-ready guides for test automation teams. Docker’s CEO cited my direct work with product managers and contribution to customer stories as key to the ecosystem.

I translate technical architecture decisions into stakeholder-ready language — the Docker customer story about Ataccama, in which I am the customer-side voice, and the second Docker customer story I contributed quantify infrastructure cost savings and deployment velocity improvements, the evidence a buying team asks for before it commits.


Developer Advocacy & Community Impact#

Documentation and developer experience

10 vendor community titles. I maintain 70+ open-source deployment blueprints on GitHub, several of them in daily production use. 1.5M+ Docker Hub pulls (aws-kubectl).

My advocacy work spans technical writing (Docker blog, 3 articles for Cypress on DEV, “Docker and Kubernetes Security” as Technical Editor), conference-adjacent content through vendor ambassador programs, and community building through The Signal Discord. Documentation is the primary advocacy channel — every guide I publish is designed to reduce time-to-production for the next engineer solving the same problem.


Community Titles#

10 vendor community titles