Systems administration

Well-run systems are boring. The work is in the routine that keeps them that way, and almost every serious incident traces back to a routine that was skipped.

Cloud environment design belongs to technology:cloud-infrastructure; this is operating the systems the company runs on.

Configuration baselines and drift

Every system class needs a defined baseline: build, hardening, agents, logging, accounts. Systems built by hand from memory diverge immediately and cannot be reasoned about as a group.

Drift is the real enemy. Detect it continuously and correct rather than document — a system that no longer matches its baseline is a system whose behavior under patching or failover is unknown.

The strongest form is disposability: rebuild rather than repair. A system you can rebuild in an hour never accumulates the sediment of a decade of manual fixes.