Senior Platform Engineer / St. Louis, Missouri
I've been doing Linux for about fifteen years. At Flexential I'm building the OpenTelemetry platform that will carry observability for 40-some datacenters: Grafana, Loki, Tempo and Mimir, with a layer of AI triage on the alerting so the person on call sees the handful of things that matter instead of the four hundred that don't.
My title says platform engineer. Before that it said SRE, and before that DevOps engineer. The job has been roughly the same the whole time. Find out why the thing broke, then automate it so it can't break that way again.
Most of what I run lives in private cloud, built with Terraform and configured with Ansible. I've done AWS work when a job called for it, but private cloud is where I'm actually at home.
On the side there's BoPag Computer Services, the Linux consulting shop I've run since 2009, and a homelab I treat like production because that's the only way I learn anything.
Available for Linux and platform consulting through BoPag. Local to St. Louis, remote anywhere.
I started out fixing computers for small businesses around St. Louis and never really stopped. The machines just got bigger. NOC tech, then Linux engineer, then the Tier 4 guy who got handed the tickets nobody else wanted, and now the observability and CI/CD work.
What I'm good at is the weird stuff. The bug that only shows up on one node out of ten. The service that's been fine for two years and isn't anymore. I like the part where nobody knows what's going on yet, and I like it even better when the fix ends up being automation instead of a runbook nobody is going to read at 3 AM.
I write everything down. There are over a thousand notes in my archive, which is the only reason I don't end up solving the same problem twice.
opentelemetry, grafana, loki, tempo, mimir, kubernetes, terraform, ansible, python
kubernetes, aws, github actions, helm, ansible, python, grafana, loki, mimir, tempo, keycloak
managed hosting, linux consulting, hosted quickbooks, file sharing, wfh vpn, m365, active directory, backups
bopag.comrhel, centos, jenkins, ansible, docker
puppet, ruby, atlassian, vmware esxi, kvm
monitoring, linux, incident triage
freebsd, openvpn, group policy, fog, centos
Ten Kubernetes nodes on Proxmox. Terraform builds the VMs, Ansible configures them, and the whole thing feeds the same Grafana, Loki and Mimir stack I use at work. Everything talks over a Nebula overlay.
It runs a media server, a pile of dashboards, secret sharing, and the test environments for most of my open source projects. It also breaks sometimes, which is sort of the point. I'd rather find out a pattern doesn't hold up on my own hardware at 11 PM than in front of somebody paying me.
The ones below are worth pointing at. The rest of it, plus whatever I've sent upstream to other people's Linux and Ansible and self-hosting projects, is at github.com/AndrewPaglusch. Star counts come live from the GitHub API, so they are whatever they are today.
One-time, end-to-end encrypted password and secret sharing. Messages self-destruct after they're read.
PHPAn opinionated Ansible role for installing and configuring a Nebula VPN overlay across mixed-OS fleets.
Jinja / AnsibleFinds Plex users sharing their account by spotting concurrent streams from different IPs, then bans them.
PythonA homebrew cellular GPS tracker built around the SIMCOM SIM7080G modem.
PythonKeeps Cloudflare DNS records in sync with the VM addresses pulled from a Proxmox cluster.
PythonProvisions Pangolin resources to match active Traefik routes, gluing two reverse proxy stacks together.
PythonFirewall rule management for iptables. Keep one drop list and apply it everywhere.
ShellA reusable Terraform module for declarative VM provisioning against Proxmox. The backbone of my homelab.
HCLAutomates re-signing GrapheneOS OTA updates with avbroot so they'll install on rooted devices.
PythonGot platform or SRE work, or a Linux problem you'd like handled through BoPag? Email me. Same goes if you just want to argue about observability tooling.