Who writes this site

I am Stéphane Robert, a French DevOps and DevSecOps engineer. I write every guide on this site myself, and I run the commands I document whenever the environment can be reproduced.

Why this site exists

The aim is to publish technical content that is actually usable, free of charge and without an account, so that two very different audiences can get something out of it:

engineers and technicians who want to progress on DevOps, SRE and security, for their own projects as much as for their job;
non-technical people, in HR or sales, who need to understand what a modern development and deployment platform is, and what DevOps, Platform Engineering and Site Reliability Engineering actually mean.

Everything is free. There is no advertising, no paywall, and no account to create. If the work helps you, supporting the site is what keeps it independent.

An unusual path

I did not start in computing. I trained as a boilermaker, with every diploma in the trade, from vocational certificate to advanced technician. I do not consider that a detour: it is where I learned to work with real constraints and real materials.

A passion for programming then took me to university, where I earned a postgraduate degree in automated production, focused on Lean. That is where the DevOps philosophy connects for me: the same ideas about flow, waste and feedback loops, applied to software instead of a workshop.

My early career was in computer-aided design (CATIA, CADDS, Pro/E), mostly on automotive products. I moved from project manager to trainer, then to head of IT for a design office, then to consultant.

I left a consulting position at DCNS (Naval Group) in Cherbourg to become an IT integrator in banking. That is where I started automating repetitive, low-value tasks, and where the DevOps interest really began.

What I have worked on

More than ten years of DevOps practice, on projects of very different shapes:

Virtualisation: designing and running VMware infrastructures
API development: Python APIs for automation
Infrastructure as Code: Ansible modules and roles for network management and CI/CD workflows
DevOps advocacy: four years spent supporting teams through DevOps transformations
Sovereign cloud: building training content and supporting customers on the French sovereign cloud, at Outscale, until August 2026

Since September 2026 I am a Principal DevSecOps Engineer at LINAGORA, working on open source environments. This site stays personal and independent of my employer, which is what lets me write here without reservation about the tools I use, including their weaknesses.

What I work with

Infrastructure as Code: Terraform, Ansible, Puppet
System administration: Linux (Debian, Ubuntu, RHEL), shell scripting
Containers and orchestration: Docker, Kubernetes, K3s
Security: server hardening, vulnerability analysis, DevSecOps
Cloud: Outscale CloudGouv, AWS, Azure
Development: Python, Go, advanced scripting
CI/CD: GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, Jenkins

How this content is written

Three rules hold for every guide, in French as in English:

Tested before it is written, whenever it can be. Commands are run in a lab or on a homelab before being written down, and when something breaks the failure stays in the guide, with the error message and the way out. Some setups cannot be reproduced here, because they need licensed appliances or hardware I do not have; those guides are checked against the upstream documentation and release notes instead, and they say which version they describe.
The why comes before the how. A command with no explanation teaches nothing; you have to know what you are doing and how to check that it worked.
Security is not a separate chapter. It runs through the guides from the start, because that is how it works in practice.

Getting in touch

Spotted an error, or something out of date? The Discord is the quickest way to tell me, and corrections are welcome.