What happens when a developer gets obsessed with solving the cognitive overload of incident response? You get Spike.sh, a clean, lightning-fast on-call platform trusted by more than 260 engineering teams across the globe.

In this fifth episode of The Root Cause, host Priyank Upadhyay sits down with Kaushik Thirthappa, founder of Spike. Kaushik shares his journey from software engineering at Wingify to bootstrapping an incident management platform where radical simplicity is the competitive moat.

We explore why customer feedback should not dictate your interface design, the "Super Mario" philosophy of SaaS onboarding, why conversational chat is often the wrong UI for operations, and how SRE will evolve into self-healing, intent-driven systems over the next five to ten years.

If you are an engineer carrying a pager, a product designer tackling complex workflows, or a founder building developer tools, this conversation is packed with practical wisdom.

Check out Spike.sh: https://spike.sh/
Explore RubixKube: https://rubixkube.ai/

The Future of On-Call: Simplicity, AI, and Building Spike | Kaushik Thirthappa

Everyone is racing to teach AI to write code. Almost no one is teaching it to talk to the network. That blind spot the infrastructure the code actually runs on — is where the next decade of automation gets won or lost.

In Episode 4 of The Root Cause, Priyank Upadhyay sits down with John Capobianco, Head of AI & DevRel at Itential, longtime network automation evangelist, author of "Automate Your Network" and the Cisco Press pyATS book, and the engineer who spent 25 years going from analog modems to agentic infrastructure. John was early to network programmability, early to AI in networking, and is now building agents that let you literally phone your infrastructure and ask it what's wrong.

We get into the Bob Ross school of automation (leave the happy little accidents in, paint around them), why prompting is the great equalizer that lets engineers skip years of Python and DSLs, how he built NetClaw to talk to networks over Twilio, the difference between giving an agent skills versus scripts, why "just start" beats waiting until you're an expert, and his relentless optimism that this is simply the next era — coax to CAT5 to wireless to SDN to agents.

The Root Cause is an original series by RubixKube — Site Reliability Intelligence: see more, plan better, act safely, and learn with every incident. 

Platform: https://rubixkube.ai
Community (Slack): https://rubixkube.ai (see footer)
#AIOps #SRE #SiteReliabilityIntelligence #DevOps #Kubernetes #NetworkAutomation #JohnCapobianco #CloudNative #AIagents

The Joy of Prompting: Network Automation and AI Agents with John Capobianco

The entire industry is teaching AI to write code. Almost no one is teaching it to run the systems that code lives on. That gap is the biggest open opportunity in infrastructure right now.

In Episode 3 of The Root Cause, Priyank Upadhyay sits down with Randy Bias  VP of Technology & Strategy at Mirantis, co-author of "Pets vs Cattle," inaugural board director of the OpenStack Foundation, and founder of Cloud Scaling (acquired by EMC). Randy was early to the internet, early to the cloud, and is now early to what he believes is the next world-altering shift: AI-assisted operations.



We get into why operators carry 80–90% toil while the tooling ignores them, why founders without operational scars struggle to serve them, the difference between a "sandbox" and a "playground" for agents, why operations is fundamentally a team sport, the one job you can never hand to an agent (judgment), and why domain expertise is the only real moat left in an AI-leveled world.



The Root Cause is an original series by RubixKube — Site Reliability Intelligence: see more, plan better, act safely, and learn with every incident.
Platform: https://rubixkube.ai
Community (Slack): https://rubixkube.ai (see footer)  

#AIOps #SRE #SiteReliabilityIntelligence #DevOps #Kubernetes #RandyBias #CloudNative #AIagents

The Spirit of Curiosity  |  Randy Bias on the Coming Decade of AI Operations

Episode 2  

How AI is impacting Jobs and Roles? Advices to young engineers and students entering the industry on how to be prepared for the future. 

The Root Cause - A podcast by RubixKube  

Learn More [https://rubixkube.ai]

Inside Cursor (Part 4)

Episode 2    

AI in the context of Platform Engineering, On-Call and SREs.
How RubixKube plugin [https://cursor.directory/plugins/rubixkube] with Cursor gives users an exponential  boost in productivity.


The Root Cause - A podcast by RubixKube    

Learn More [https://rubixkube.ai/]

Inside Cursor (Part 3)

Episode 2  

Mohit gives us a peek inside Cursor and AI tools. What he uses, Where Cursor shines and where it still fails and some really interesting ways people are using Cursor.

The Root Cause - A podcast by RubixKube  

Learn More [https://rubixkube.ai]

Inside Cursor (Part 2)

Episode 2

A self-taught, "non-technical" guy ended up at one of the most important AI companies in the world. What does he see about the tool, about the work, about the people that rest of us are missing?

The Root Cause - A podcast by RubixKube

Learn More

Inside Cursor

What a self-taught operator sees about AI. Cursor and future of Work.

The second episode of The Root Cause explores the journey of Mohit, coming from a non-engineering background and how he landed at Cursor.



The Non-Engineer Inside Cursor

EPISODE 1
Observability is Done. What Comes Next.

Observability won the last decade by giving humans more data. The next decade is not about more dashboards. It is about systems that understand themselves.

This episode lays out what SRI is, why it had to exist, and what AIOps is getting wrong. Not a product pitch. Not a founder origin story. A worldview episode.

Learn more [https://rubixkube.ai]

Beyond Observability

Priyank Upadhyay (@anahatam) · Zencastr

Priyank Upadhyay (@anahatam)

Every company runs on software. When it breaks (and it always breaks) humans step in. They check code, dashboards, make guesses, and hope they fix it before customers notice.

That's the slow, expensive way. We think there's a better one.

We built RubixKube [https://rubixkube.ai/?utm_source=luma]: Platform intelligence Layer that watches your systems, figure out what's wrong, fix it, and learn from every incident.
We're going to show you what that looks like, live.

The Root Cause by RubixKube