Lab guides that end in something running
In Practice is a series of hands-on books for the people who operate infrastructure rather than evaluate it. Every chapter closes with a lab that runs on your own machine — no cloud account, no spare server — and with the error messages you will actually meet, their causes and their fixes.
The gap these books address is not conceptual. Engineers understand what a tool does within an hour, then spend months learning what the defaults will cost them and what happens at three in the morning. That second part is what gets written down here.
Book One — available
Vault in Practice
A Hands-On Lab Guide to HashiCorp Vault and OpenBao
Follow a fictional logistics company from passwords-in-Git to a production-shaped installation. Split an encryption key with Shamir and then lose it on purpose. Write policies that fail, and find out why in one command. Issue database credentials that did not exist until they were asked for. Break a Raft cluster's quorum, and put it back together.
Five chapters ask you to destroy your own setup, because nobody who has recovered a sealed cluster under pressure learned how from a reference manual. The book covers the Vault Associate exam objectives in full and ends with a practice exam.
Book Two — in preparation
Enterprise AI Platform
GPU infrastructure, model serving and running an AI platform in-house
The platform underneath the models: GPUs under Kubernetes, inference servers, an AI gateway with identity and quotas, governance, observability and the cost per thousand requests. Written for platform engineers, not for data scientists.
A German edition is finished and available free of charge. The English edition for this series is in preparation.