Forward Deployed Engineering
Should you use a Kubernetes operator or MCP servers for FDE infrastructure? It's the wrong question. They operate at different layers of the stack and you'll eventually want both.
Forward Deployed Engineering
In Post 4 I argued Kubernetes operators are the wrong tool for most enterprise FDE. Here's the beachhead architecture for the environments where they are the right tool.
Forward Deployed Engineering
OpenAI and Anthropic's FDE models look nothing like what works at a Stuttgart manufacturing plant. The constraints are different. The infrastructure needs to be too.
Forward Deployed Engineering
The FDE model produces outcomes no other delivery model can match. The economics don't work unless you systematize what your engineers learn in the field. Here's the math.
Forward Deployed Engineering
Gary's COBOL job runs at 2 AM. It has no documentation. He's retiring in November. This is why product-led growth fails in enterprise — and why Forward Deployed Engineering exists.
Forward Deployed Engineering
Sarah is the future of enterprise software delivery — brilliant, expensive, and completely unscalable. Unless you give her an operating system. The case for FDE infrastructure.
Forward Deployed Engineering
Every major enterprise software failure has the same root cause: the people who built the product never understood the environment it was deployed into. Forward Deployed Engineering is the fix.