About
Hi, I’m Andrei Vasiliu, currently Chief Platform & ISMS Officer at Alpian Technologies in Rome, Italy, and a self-admitted homelab addict. I’m originally from Romania, and yes, I somehow made the jump from Civil Engineering (keeping actual physical buildings from falling down) to DevOps and Platform Engineering (keeping virtual pods from mysteriously crash-looping).
I really enjoy building enterprise-grade infrastructure from absolute zero, locking down systems so tightly that even I get locked out sometimes, and driving digital transformation for a regulated European banking group. These days that means owning platform strategy and information security governance end-to-end, currently leading the platform build for a brand-new digital private banking initiative, and running our ISO 27001 program from risk assessment to certificate in hand.
Along the way I’ve architected multi-cloud solutions for banks, shipped a Backstage-based internal developer platform that cut onboarding time by 40%, kept 99.9% uptime on systems where downtime makes headlines, designed the Zero Trust network nobody asked for but everybody’s auditors love, and built engineering teams from greenfield more times than I’d like to admit… mostly fueled by Friday afternoon deployments and an endless stream of YAML files.
What is this blog about?#
This space is dedicated to my homelab journey and technical rants. I treat my home infrastructure exactly like a production environment… which means my spouse occasionally has to sit through an RCA (Root Cause Analysis) when the smart home Wi-Fi drops. Here, I take the massively over-complicated enterprise patterns I use at work and forcibly cram them into a small server rack in my house, just for fun.
Professional Expertise & Stuff I Break Often#
- Kubernetes & Cloud Native: Wrangling nodes (GKE, AKS, K3d, bare-metal), untangling Istio service meshes, and trying to figure out why DNS is failing again.
- GitOps & CI/CD: Forcing ArgoCD, GitHub Actions, and Terraform to deploy things automatically so I can find new and exciting ways to break production.
- Security & Governance: Zero Trust Networking, ISO 27001 ISMS paperwork, and setting off enterprise monitoring alerts at 3 AM.
- Platform Engineering: Trying to make developers happy (a true test of human endurance), hoarding secrets, and keeping systems somewhat reliable.
- Homelab Hardware: Turning a perfectly good closet into a high-decibel jet-engine testing facility just to run 5 containers that would have worked perfectly fine on a Raspberry Pi.
Let’s Connect#
If you want to see my actual professional facade or just check out my code, drop by the links below: