About
I’m Andrea Cervesato, based in Milan, Italy. I work on infrastructure — mostly cloud, mostly Kubernetes, mostly trying to keep things from falling over.
I started in 2004 doing sysadmin work on HP-UX boxes in a telco. Since then I’ve racked servers, run cables, debugged things at 3 AM, and slowly moved up the stack from bare metal to cloud. Along the way I picked up some certifications, some scars, and a healthy distrust of slides that say “it just works.”
What I do#
I’m a Customer Engineer at Google Cloud, which is a fancy title for “I help companies figure out what to do with cloud infrastructure.” Before that, I did cloud-native consulting at Red Hat for banks, military, and public administration — the kind of places where “move fast and break things” gets you fired. And before that, I ran 4 datacenters with about 3,000 servers at Irideos, with a team of four people and a budget of approximately zero.
What this blog is about#
I write about things I’ve worked on and mistakes I’ve made. Infrastructure trade-offs, cloud architecture decisions, and the gap between what vendors promise and what actually happens in production.
I write in English because the infrastructure community thinks in English. I think in Italian, which sometimes makes things more colorful.
Certifications#
- Google Professional Cloud Architect (2024)
- Certified Kubernetes Administrator — CKA (2021)
- Red Hat Certified Engineer — RHCE (2020)
- Red Hat Certified Specialist in OpenShift Administration (2020)
- VMware Certified Professional — VCP-DCV (2014)
- HP-UX, AIX, SUSE certified (2006–2009)