Practical, battle-tested walkthroughs covering the infrastructure, databases, security, cloud, observability, and automation I work with every day. Written for the engineer who needs it done right, not just done.
A complete walkthrough from downloading the ISO to provisioning your first VM. Covers installation, networking, storage, and the first hardening pass you should do before running anything production-adjacent.
A no-compromise install guide: tempdb topology, memory allocation, MAXDOP, instant file initialization, service account hardening, and the post-install health check I run on every new instance.
Deploy pfSense as your network edge: interface setup, VLAN segmentation, firewall rule patterns, NAT, DHCP, and enabling Suricata for inline intrusion detection — explained with the "why" behind every rule.
