https://retakedata.com/missions/Recent content in Missions on RetakeDataHugoen<a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">CC BY-NC 4.0</a>https://retakedata.com/missions/observability-stack-audit/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://retakedata.com/missions/observability-stack-audit/<p>You have dashboards nobody trusts, alerts that fire at 3 AM for no reason, and a Loki bill that keeps climbing. The stack works, technically. But it is not working for your team.</p> <p>I operated an 11 TB/day observability stack across Loki (400 pods, 3TB RAM), Elasticsearch (200TB, 3 DCs), and Thanos (50TB, 200 nodes). My specific work: migrating Fluentd to Vector for performance, fine-tuning Loki with memcache clusters, building recording rules that converted TB/day of load-balancer logs into queryable metrics, and maintaining 12-month Thanos storage for ML forecasting.</p>https://retakedata.com/missions/vm-migration-factory/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://retakedata.com/missions/vm-migration-factory/<p>Most teams operating hundreds of VMs do it manually: ticket, provision, configure, register, repeat. Every VM is slightly different. Every migration is a project. Every provider has its own quirks that someone has to remember.</p> <p>This mission replaces that with a pipeline. I built this exact system to manage 3000+ VMs across 4 providers and 10 datacenters, without Kubernetes. You open a PR with a tfvars file, merge it, and the VM goes from nothing to configured, monitored, and receiving traffic.</p>https://retakedata.com/missions/proxmox-ceph-ha-platform/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://retakedata.com/missions/proxmox-ceph-ha-platform/<p>VMware licensing changes pushed a lot of teams to look for alternatives. Proxmox is the answer, but a Proxmox cluster that survives real failure scenarios needs proper Ceph design, network segmentation, quorum tuning, and automated provisioning.</p> <p>I deployed 100+ Proxmox nodes with PXE automation across every storage backend: ZFS, NFS, SAN, NVMe over Fabric, and Ceph. I led vSphere-to-Proxmox migrations (Pure Storage SAN, NVMe-oF, MultipathD), Proxmox 4-to-8 upgrades with near-zero downtime using NFS buffer, and designed HA architectures with LACP/EVPN/VPC.</p>https://retakedata.com/missions/onprem-ai-operations/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://retakedata.com/missions/onprem-ai-operations/<p>Every team wants AI-assisted operations. Not every team can send their logs, metrics, and incident data to OpenAI. If you operate under GDPR constraints, data sovereignty requirements, or strict security policies, on-prem AI is not optional.</p> <p>I built this exact setup: 6 GPUs across 2 servers in the datacenter, vLLM serving, a private RAG pipeline over 1000+ PDFs with PostgreSQL/pgvector, and Graphia, an RBAC-aware SRE agent that lets engineering teams query their Grafana infrastructure without needing to know LogQL or PromQL.</p>