Insights
Technical writing
Fractional SRE in the UK: What Fits in a Few Days a Month, and What Doesn't
What fractional SRE covers in practice: SLOs, burn-rate alerting, alert clean-up and observability pipelines. What it can't cover, and UK salary and day-rate figures with sources.
What Fractional DevOps Costs in the UK: Day Rates, Retainers, and Where the Numbers Come From
UK fractional DevOps and infrastructure day rates, with sources. Contract rates from ITJobsWatch, published direct rates from UK providers, and why the two differ.
Migrating from Promtail to Grafana Alloy: Logs, Cardinality, and Production Failure Modes
A practical guide to migrating from Promtail to Grafana Alloy across bare-metal and Kubernetes — consolidating telemetry, controlling Prometheus cardinality, and the production failure modes to expect.
From my personal blog
Grafana Alloy in My Homelab: Why I Run Three Separate Instances
How I split Grafana Alloy across three separate instances in my own cluster, and why clustering — not tidy separation of concerns — is the reason for the split.
VyOS Firewall Rules: A Real Zone-Based Config, Explained
A real zone-based VyOS firewall configuration pulled from production routers, including a syntax change the official docs don't cover yet.
Using FreeIPA CA as an ACME Provider for cert-manager
Using FreeIPA's built-in CA as an ACME provider for cert-manager in Kubernetes, including DNS-01 challenges and TSIG key setup.
VyOS as a Reverse Proxy Load Balancer
Configuring VyOS as a HAProxy-based reverse proxy and load balancer, including bypassing CGNAT and preserving client IPs with the PROXY protocol.
How to Redirect Hardcoded DNS with VyOS
Redirecting hardcoded DNS queries on a home network using VyOS NAT rules — useful for enforcing ad-blocking with Pi-hole or Blocky.