Contract systems administration.
If it involves Linux servers, deployment, monitoring, security, or automation - especially when you're short on in-house time or specialist depth - it's my bread and butter.
- Stabilising production, reducing incidents, making changes safer
- Turning "tribal knowledge" into runbooks and reproducible systems
- Hardening and compliance, without blocking deploys
- Building DR plans you can actually execute
Configuration & change management
Infrastructure as code, automated configuration, backups, and monitoring for repeatability and auditability.
- Declarative server/app configuration (and a path out of snowflakes)
- Backups you can restore, with recovery rehearsals
- Alerting routed to the right people, with the noise trimmed
Continuous integration & deployment
Build pipelines that test, ship, migrate, and roll back safely - with less manual button pushing.
- Build/test automation, deploy previews, and clear release steps
- Safe migrations and reliable rollback paths
- Secrets handling and "least privilege" in CI
Security hardening & compliance
Hardening, firewalling, encryption, MFA/OAuth, logging, and systems designed with ISO27001 in mind.
- Baseline hardening, patching strategy, and audit-friendly change history
- Identity, access, and secrets management
- Threat modelling and pragmatic controls
High availability & disaster recovery
Design for failure: redundancy, replication, load balancing, and rehearsed recovery plans.
- Design reviews and incremental HA improvements
- Restore testing, runbooks, and DR exercises
- Post-incident follow‑ups that actually prevent repeats
Incident response & "night shift" coverage
Hands-on debugging, mitigation, and follow-through, with changes so the next incident costs less.
- Production triage, temporary mitigations, and root-cause analysis
- Monitoring and alerting improvements based on real incidents
- UTC+10/11 availability that complements other teams
AI augmentation (self‑hosted)
Open-source AI where third-party tooling isn't safe or viable: analysis and retrieval over your own data.
- Private deployments and access control
- RAG over internal docs/logs (where appropriate)
- Clear guardrails and a way to tell if it's helping
How engagements usually run
Most work starts with a short discovery: what you have, what you need, and what's a priority. From there we agree on a plan and get to work.
- Discovery: inventory, risks, quick wins, and constraints
- Roadmap: priorities, timelines, and concrete deliverables
- Implementation: automation, hardening, monitoring, and documentation
- Handover: knowledge transfer, runbooks, and "what to do next"
- A repo of infrastructure/config-as-code (with reviewable change history)
- Monitoring dashboards and alert routing that matches your on-call reality
- Runbooks: "how to deploy", "how to rollback", "how to restore"
- Security notes: what's changed and why
- A plan for the future: whether you have the know-how and resources in-house, or if you need ongoing support from me.