Viktor Pashaiev
I started with Slackware on a live network in 2005. Today I build infrastructure that actually works - automation, Kubernetes, cloud, system reliability. For companies that don't want to make phone calls at night.
Who I am
My professional career started with Linux in 2005 with a slightly crazy task: migrating an entire office from Windows NT to Linux on a live network. We picked Slackware. To this day, I have no idea why we chose it, but it worked. When the first DHCP server handed out an IP address, it felt like magic. I changed my terminal font to green, felt a bit like Neo from The Matrix, and never looked back.
For the last 20 years, I’ve been building, automating, and rescuing IT infrastructures. I’ve managed everything from bare-metal servers to massive Kubernetes clusters and cloud environments. For a large part of my career, I was the final escalation point - the engineer they called when a critical production system went down, nothing made sense, and everyone was starting to panic.
It turns out, I actually like those situations. There is a certain kind of zen in staying calm and reading strace logs or analyzing network packets at 3 AM.
"The system always tells the truth. You just have to know where to look."
Over the years, I've learned a few universal truths:
- A backup that nobody has ever tested is just a file taking up space.
- If you configure a server by hand more than once, you should have automated it.
- The smarter the network looks, the more often the real problem is something surprisingly simple.
Today, as an independent consultant, I take full responsibility for my clients' infrastructure. My goal is simple: make your servers so stable, secure, and predictable that IT becomes the most boring and uneventful part of your business.
Technology Stack
Where I've been, what I've done
- Full stack simultaneously: architecture, IaC, Tier-3 support, production incidents - for multiple clients at once
- Terraform + Ansible: server setup time reduced from days to under an hour
- Kubernetes on AWS (EKS) and GCP (GKE), ArgoCD, GitOps - hundreds of nodes, multiple regions
- Observability from scratch: Prometheus + Grafana + Loki, SLOs, dashboards that work at 3 AM
- Security scanning as a CI/CD blocker, Linux kernel tuning at the NUMA and HugePages level
- On-premise → AWS and Azure migrations with zero downtime
- Ansible roles library - internal standard, manual work reduction by >50%
- Tier-3 debugging: strace, tcpdump, gdb, issues that the vendor couldn't solve
- Managing large VMware vSphere environments (ESXi / vCenter)
- Linux kernel tuning for SAP HANA and NetWeaver: HugePages, NUMA, storage I/O
- 24/7 HA clusters on Pacemaker and Corosync - zero unplanned downtime for several years
- Kubernetes and OpenShift - hundreds of nodes, multiple regions
- Migration from Windows NT to Linux - on a live network. Slackware. We made it.
- Linux and FreeBSD, DHCP, DNS, email, VPN - from scratch