🎉 Welcome to Simple Engineer Notes!

Hi there!

This channel is about sharing my simple thoughts and notes about complex topics from an engineer's point of view.

Who am I?
- In real life: cyclist, camper, engineer & coffee person.
- At work: As an infrastructure simplifying engineer, I’ve seen infrastructure from completely different points of view: as a system administrator, software-defined storage developer, and DevOps engineer. Fortunately, there’s an unchanged part. I believe that infrastructure is code and therefore we must use the same philosophy for infrastructure as for software development.

What to expect here:
- Simple explanations of tricky engineering ideas.
- Personal notes and real-life lessons about IT, IaC, DevOps, automation, engineering

Thanks for joining me on this journey to make complicated things simple.

The most interesting posts:
⚡️ Blackout in Spain & Portugal 2025-04-28
🛠 VmWare & Hardware version debug
📂 Photo archive

P.S. it might be interesting to read the articles
- IDLC = SDLC + Ansible: IaC Development Life Cycle: Ansible based story
- How to test Ansible and don’t go nuts
- Lessons learned from testing Over 200,000 lines of Infrastructure Code
- System call interception in linux-kernel module
- A list of awesome IaC testing articles, speeches & links. Especially about Ansible.

🤖 GPT 4 IaC Usecases

I’ve made some practical experiments with GPT in the IaC context and want to share the gist from the article:

🔥 Documentations & presentations
✅ Create Ansible lookup plugin
✅ Generate documentation
✅ Explain Jinja2 expressions
❓ Fix errors in Ansible roles
⛔️ Debug Ansible OTC dynamic inventory plugin
⛔️ Explain dependencies across the project
💡 PR reviewer
💡 Increase IaC test coverage

#article

✈️ Terraform for VMware: Key Takeaways and Lessons from Managing Hundreds of VMs

Managing a large number of virtual machines can be challenging. As our infrastructure grew, we needed a better way to handle the complexity. That’s when we turned to Terraform to help us manage our VMware environment more efficiently. the gist from the article:

Lessons learned
1. Use remote state
2. It's tricky to catch more than 10 changes at one time
3. With great power comes great responsibility
4. Bulk changes can lead to performance degradation
5. Avoid configuration drift between VMware & terraform
6. Instead of recreating VM you can simply move it
7. Use prevent_destroy to avoid VMs deletion
8. Use simple & obvious structure to make entrance level lower
9. Use to ansible dynamic inventory based on tags
10. It's possible to add the missing functionality

Benefits

1. It's really easy to perform bulk updates
2. Re-create infra from nothing
3. Trackable changes
4. Single source of the truth

Want to try
1. Terraform pull request automation via Atlantis
2. Build green button in jenkins
3. Windows automation
4. Cloud-init for setting hostname like here (sry it's in RU)
5. Tests for terraform like for ansible

#article

👩‍🦯 yoke - make IaC more complicated

I've just found the https://yokecd.github.io/docs/ . Authors tries to solve portability problem & make reproducible solution for IaC. In general it's a good idea in the right direction. But it introduces one more abstraction level. They propose pack the configuration into webassembly and execute it later. I assume, that it will be quite tricky troubleshoot in the feature in complex environment.

links:
- https://xeiaso.net/blog/2025/yoke-k8s/
- https://yokecd.github.io/docs/

#iac

Sometimes simplicity is a road to the hell

#fun

🎯 10 Lessons from Werner von Siemens

I’ve just read Personal Recollections of Werner von Siemens and noted:

1️⃣ Solve Real Problems – Siemens didn’t invent for fun. He built things like better telegraphs and generators because people needed them.
2️⃣ Start Small, Think Big - the initial idea was simple: create remote detonator, but ended as cross Atlantic land line.
3️⃣ Make Things More Efficient - each iteration of landlines, dinamos were better than the previous one. It like ci/cd.
4️⃣ Turn Ideas into Products - He didn’t just study science; he turned discoveries into useful inventions.
5️⃣ Take Smart Risks - Siemens took steps in new technology and business, but always calculated the risks.
6️⃣ Keep It Simple - He believed good engineering should be practical and useful.
7️⃣ Be Ethical and Long-Term Oriented - He treated employees well and built trust with customers.

Summary: engineering isn’t about making over complicated things - it’s about making life easier for people. It was 150 years ago and it’s still relevant.

#book