September 18, 2025
For years, I hosted this blog and several other services on AWS.
AWS is powerful, but it is also expensive and deeply entropic.
It often feels like every problem on AWS has three different services as possible solutions.
Each service has its own setup, and keeping track of everything just gets harder over time.
For personal infrastructure, the financial and cognitive cost simply stopped being worth it.
That’s why I decided to close my AWS account and move everything somewhere else.
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August 31, 2025
Last week, I renewed my Red Hat Certified Specialist in Ansible Network Automation (EX457) certification.
As I’m already a Red Hat Certified Architect and have passed this same exam a couple of years ago, I wasn’t too worried about it.
Still, it is always interesting to see how exams evolve.
Since I did not remember the kind of content that was there last time, I read the objectives page and assumed it would have been more on the networking side.
But, in reality, the exam leaned much more toward Ansible playbooks, modules, and automation patterns than network-specific plumbing.
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July 30, 2025
At this point, it has become kind of a ritual for me: renewing my Google Professional Architect Certification during the summer months.
This time around, I renewed it slightly earlier than usual, which is today instead of the second half of August, as I did two years back.
Knowing the usual difficulties I have with scheduling the Google Cloud certification renewal exam, I started very early and, after a couple of attempts, managed to book the exam!
I’m not sure whether I’m getting better at booking Google Cloud exams or whether the system is improving, making it easier to use.
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June 30, 2025
When buying a service, you’re not just buying what’s on the label.
You’re buying into someone else’s business model.
This aspect is now becoming even more relevant, considering that many times, when buying a product, you are also buying a service with it since there are more and more hybrid products.
If you don’t understand how your provider is structured and how it makes money, you will not fully understand your relationship with them.
And you’re more likely to get blindsided.
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May 31, 2025
In the coming couple of weeks I’ll be heading to the Common Europe Congress (CEC2025), Flock 2025, and DevConf.cz 2025, some of the best community-driven events in the ecosystem.
If you’re around, let’s catch up and share stories over coffee!
Common Europe Congress 2025 (Gothenburg, June 2–4)
The Common Europe Congress is the largest educational convention for IBM Power users in Europe.
This year it’s taking place at the Gothia Towers in Gothenburg, Sweden.
I’ll be there from June 2nd through the 4th, and I have two sessions lined up:
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April 30, 2025
If you’ve followed my posts over the years, you know I prefer clean solutions to less clean ones for my home lab (more to come on this!).
Over the past year, I settled on a pattern that gives me the isolation of Kubernetes Namespaces without any of its weight: one private Podman network per application, plus Traefik in a shared “DMZ” network that terminates TLS and forwards traffic where it needs to go.
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March 31, 2025
For a while now, I’ve been looking into optimizing and reorganizing some of the infrastructure that powers my self-hosting services.
After evaluating a few alternatives, Scaleway’s Dedibox lineup caught my attention: it is a European company with good hardware and decent pricing.
However, as with every good solution, it is not perfect.
Scaleway does not provide Fedora as an OS option for their Dedibox machines.
They offer a decent selection, including Rocky Linux, Debian, and Ubuntu — but no Fedora.
Now, if you know me, you know that Fedora is not just my distro of choice — it’s the one I trust for both personal and professional projects.
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February 28, 2025
Every one of us probably has some physical keys in our pocket or purse right now.
This familiarity with this common object might make us forget about how the security of those objects actually works.
I see pictures of keys shared very often in groups or on social media.
Sometimes this happens because a set of keys has been found somewhere, and the person uploading the picture is trying to help their owner to identify their keys.
Other times is simply a picture where the keys are not the subject, but are casually in frame.
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January 31, 2025
The next few days are shaping up to be packed with open-source goodness!
I’ll be heading to CentOS Connect, FOSDEM, and CfgMgmtCamp, three of the best events in the ecosystem.
These conferences always include a great mix of technical talks, hallway conversations, and spontaneous meetups with friends—both old and new.
If you’re around, let’s catch up!
CentOS Connect (Brussels, January 31)
Although the event run yesterday and today, I’ll only be able to attend today.
CentOS Connect is a small but incredibly valuable event where the wider CentOS community (Fedora, CentOS, and all the Enterprise Linux distros) meets to discuss the space’s present and future.
It’s a great opportunity to meet contributors, learn about upcoming changes, and exchange ideas with people who shape the CentOS ecosystem.
I really like this event because its atmosphere is similar to Flock: very casual and more like a friends’ gathering than a conference.
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December 31, 2024
Although the definitions of Open Source are related to specific software characteristics (i.e., the license), the reality is much more complex.
Open-source is way more related to a social contract that the software’s creator and its users morally sign than the definition might lead you to believe.
This social contract’s key aspect concerns the software’s current license and the licenses of future versions.
This is because although users of open-source software usually do not pay to use it, they incur high costs to do so.
Examples of those costs are training costs and potential costs to replace a certain technology should it become unavailable in the future.
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(Fabio Alessandro Locati|Fale)'s blog