taiki.be

About

I build and run container platforms on bare metal, mostly for telco infrastructure. Fifteen years in IT, the last eight on Kubernetes and OpenShift, the last five at telco scale across eight datacentres.

I’m most useful where the platform is the hard part: bare-metal OpenShift, multi-cluster GitOps, software-defined storage, and migrations that can’t take downtime.

Availability

Open to remote contract and permanent roles. Based in Brussels (CET/CEST). Dutch (native) · English · French · German (basic)

Reach me at nino@taiki.be.

Current work

Senior infrastructure engineer at a telecom carrier, since 2020.

  • Estate: 8+ datacentres globally, 400+ HPE bare-metal servers, 1500+ VMs, RHEL 7 through 10.
  • OpenShift: bare-metal and hybrid clusters, agent-based install, A-to-Z architecture of the cluster stack. Global telco rollout across 9 clusters — 6 DMZ, 2 backend, 1 non-production.
  • Management plane: dedicated multi-site OpenShift management clusters. Day-0 agent-assisted install, day-1/2 via FluxCD, local ODF plus SAN.
  • GitOps: ArgoCD and FluxCD across the estate, currently consolidating onto FluxCD.
  • Virtualisation migration: VMware to OpenShift Virtualization — sizing, low-latency telco workload validation, compact and hosted control plane topologies, automation integration.
  • Storage: Red Hat Ceph (RGW/RBD/CephFS), multi-site, HAProxy + keepalived. Rook/ODF.
  • Secrets and identity: HashiCorp Vault multi-site (KV, JWT, Kubernetes auth), FreeIPA, Keycloak with Kerberos trust and SSO.
  • Automation: Ansible, Terraform, Packer across day 0/1/2. AWX/Tower. Self-managed GitLab CI with runners on OpenShift.
  • Also: Rancher and RKE2, StackGres PostgreSQL HA, Prometheus / Alertmanager / Grafana, BIND9 hidden-master with FreeIPA zone transfer, F5 LTM, KMIP-to-AWS-KMS proxy, in-house Django provisioning app, iTop / NetBox / Sirius CMDBs.

Before that

Telenet (2020) — RHEL/CentOS estate across 4 datacentres, RHEL 5/6/7→8 migration planning, Satellite/Foreman, and 2PB of SUSE Ceph including a vendor migration and a Nautilus→Octopus upgrade.

Stepstone (2019–2020) — AWS infrastructure for the Search and Match team. Nginx/OpenResty load balancing with Lua, Kafka, InfluxDB, Grafana.

MLOZ-IT (2018–2019) — first OpenShift work: 3.9 through 3.11 cluster deployment and management, alongside WebSphere and IBM Integration Bus.

Proximedia / Publicis (2017–2018) — vSphere estate, Ceph-backed Elasticsearch, Puppet and MCollective, pfSense, SSO.

Earlier: systems support and web development. I came into infrastructure sideways — social-cultural work, then Drupal and PHP, then Linux.

Depth

Expert-level, day to day: Linux, Kubernetes, OpenShift, Ansible, Ceph and software-defined storage, VMware vSphere, HAProxy/keepalived, Bash.

Strong: ArgoCD, Terraform, Packer, Docker, PostgreSQL, Nginx, Python, LDAP/FreeIPA, Keycloak, KVM, SAN/NAS, firewalls, packet analysis.

Outside work

Member of Hackerspace Brussels. I run a self-hosted service estate — federated chat and ~60 services on a single host — and contribute to mainline Linux for ARM64 Qualcomm laptop platforms.