Ferenc Erki

independent IT advisor

I provide services around infrastructure & platform, software delivery with CI/CD, and open source topics.

Infrastructure & platform

I designed, built, and maintained reliable infrastructure and platform solutions throughout my entire career. These projects often enabled cost optimization, or opened new revenue streams.

I passionately apply the KISS design principle to deliver lightweight, performant setups. With this approach I’ve successfully scaled business use cases up to a few hundred managed endpoints, handling 350k+ events per second, and making sense of data on the petabyte scale.

While I prefer self-hosted bare metal environments, I also worked with private and public cloud solutions based on OpenStack, hyper-converged infrastructure based on Proxmox, as well as popular Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) providers, such as AWS and Heroku.

I can set up or optimize infrastructure as code (IaC), automate processes, introduce test-driven infrastructure operations, and enable insights into the systems through modern observability practices, beyond monitoring, metric collection, and log analytics.

Software delivery with CI/CD

As both contributor to and signatory of Minimum Viable CD, I advocate establishing a core set of practices required to improve the delivery flow while avoiding common pitfalls and mistakes.

Continuous Delivery depends on a minimum set of activities and capabilities such as immutable artifacts, test environments, rollbacks, and definitive pipelines – and Continuous Integration.

In turn, Continuous Integration depends on another minimum set of activities and capabilities, like integrating all changes at least once a day, automated testing – and Trunk Based Development.

Since I gained my first build server experiences with Jenkins in 2014, I most often used Travis CI, GitLab CI, and GitHub Actions, while also implemented custom solutions based on Laminar CI, and Git hooks.

I can establish CI/CD processes and systems, as well as optimize existing ones, regardless of using or aiming on-premises or hosted solutions.

After all, CI/CD does not mean something we have – it means something we do.

Open source

Open source gets widely recognized for delivering high quality outcomes, while enabling collaboration between volunteers – and even competitors.

Inner source enables adopting open source culture and principles within organizations through open collaboration, open communication, and quality assurance.

I rely on open source solutions both for my personal and professional computing needs since 2005. I participate most actively in the Rex, Perl, and Gentoo communities, while also contributing to different projects via code, documentation, package maintenance, translation, and management. I founded and organized Open Source Contributors’ Session meetups to enable others to participate as well.

I can support you navigate the open source landscape by preparing projects for publishing, and guiding adoption of best fitting practices at your organization.