👋 Hello there! I’m Benedict.
By day, I’m a DevOps Engineer with 8+ years of experience, focused on automating internal tools to optimize costs, streamline workflows, and enhance developer efficiency. My professional journey has been centered around building robust, scalable, and efficient infrastructure that empowers development teams to deliver software faster and with higher quality.
Beyond the professional world, I like to tinker in my homelab. It’s my digital playground, a place to experiment with new technologies, solve intriguing problems, improve my quality of life, and build systems purely for the joy of creating and understanding.
🌐 My Journey into Infrastructure & Automation
It began with an apprenticeship at ilogs mobile GmbH, where I first dipped my toes into operations and got hands-on experience with system administration. This foundational experience quickly led me into the world of DevOps at Bitmovin Inc. Here, I spent nearly four years immersed in crafting CI/CD pipelines across various platforms, managing Google Managed Kubernetes clusters, and deploying automated testing clients with Ansible.
Currently, as a Senior DevOps Engineer at MeisterLabs GmbH, I’m focused on creating and supporting advanced systems for autoscaling GitHub Action runners in GKE, implementing robust RBAC setups, and optimizing CI/CD pipelines that accelerate the development process for dozens of teams. My professional work constantly reinforces my belief in the power of automation, collaborative approaches, and the importance of continuous learning – principles I bring into my homelab endeavors.
💡 Beyond the Office: My Homelab & Personal Playground
My homelab is where my passion for building and optimizing truly comes alive. It’s a dynamic environment for continuous experimentation and a personal laboratory for understanding how systems truly work.
My current setup is built around:
- TalosOS Cluster: Multiple mini PCs form a cluster, allowing me to experiment with high availability and distributed systems on a small scale.
- Unraid Server: For workloads that don’t require high availability, this server doubles as my central network storage, ensuring my data is organized and accessible. It’s also a playground for services like Plex, HomeAssistant, and various Docker containers.
I’m constantly experimenting and refining: from migrating services like Nginx to Caddy, to exploring different deployment methods for this very portfolio site.
Here are some highlights of projects, both professional and personal, that showcase my drive for innovation and efficiency, embodying the same spirit of automation and problem-solving:
Introducing Renovate: Led the migration from Dependabot to Renovate, significantly improving dependency management efficiency and reliability across the company by overcoming Dependabot’s limitations with Helm value files and providing broader support and control.
Improving Security & Workflow Standardization: Architected the implementation of Workload Identity for secure GitHub authentication to our Cloud Platform and established a centralized repository for shared GitHub Actions, fostering code reuse and enhancing maintainability for critical workflows like authentication and cache management.
CI/CD Optimization & Automation: Designed a unified system for building custom, rootless Docker images across diverse tech stacks. Developed a sophisticated build script that automates Dockerfile generation based on dependency lists and integrates with Renovate for automated image updates, resulting in faster build times and streamlined dependency management.
Scalable CI Runner Infrastructure in GKE: Developed a dynamic Helm Chart utilizing custom GitHub Actions Runner images, deployed as KEDA ScaledJobs for event-based auto-scaling. This innovation enabled our CI Runners to scale dynamically based on usage, leading to significant reductions in wasted resources and substantial cost improvements.
🛠️ My Digital Toolkit
While my passion drives my exploration, I rely on a robust set of tools and technologies to bring my ideas to life, both professionally and in my homelab. This isn’t an exhaustive list, but rather a snapshot of my go-to technologies that power my infrastructure and development workflows:
- System Administration: Linux, Ubuntu, Bash, Ansible, Systemd/Launchd
- CI/CD & Automation: CircleCI, Github Actions, Jenkins, Codeship, ArgoCD, Renovate, KEDA
- Containerization & Orchestration: Docker, Docker Compose, Portainer, Kubernetes
- Cloud & Infrastructure: GCP (GKE, Cloud Storage, LB, IAM), Cert-Manager, Traefik, Helm
- Networking: OpenVPN, SNMP, Ubiquiti, Tailscale, Wireguard, Caddy, Nginx
- Monitoring: Grafana, Prometheus, Glances
- Productivity & Collaboration: Confluence, Jira, GitHub, Sonar, Linear
📍 Connect & Find Me
I’m always open to connecting with fellow enthusiasts, sharing insights, or discussing new ideas. Feel free to reach out!
- 📧 Email: [email protected]
- 🔗 LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/bndct-devops
- 🐙 GitHub: github.com/bndct-devops
- 🗺️ Location: Klagenfurt am Wörthersee, Carinthia, Austria