Aleksey Tsalolikhin

I am a UNIX/Linux systems administrator and trainer, here to help keep the lights on for our sociotechnical civilization.

Professional Background

I am a master generalist systems administrator, with a specialty in configuration management: expert in large-scale automation of Linux system administration and infrastructure insight using CFEngine Enterprise.

I’ve delivered professional training at USENIX LISA (CFEngine, CI/CD) and many smaller conferences and meetups.

Notable Experience

I have worked in a variety of environments, large and small. I’ve been both the only sysadmin and a member of a large team. More than once, I’ve been the first sysadmin/DevOps/SRE hire, in a fast-growing company, and left behind an established smooth-running team.

I’ve started my sysadmin career at EarthLink in the late nineties as the Internet went mainstream; I helped digital cinema explode onto the scene and replace film faster than anyone expected in the oughties as a sysadmin/architect and then Director of Operations at Deluxe Digital Cinema; I helped the sysadmin community adopt configuration management tooling and mindset in the two thousand teens as a writer, speaker, trainer and consultant through my company Vertical Sysadmin and in the twenties I was part of another explosive growth event (the advent of LLM chatbots) as the first SRE at Perplexity AI.

I am now working at Yahoo, helping to operate one of the world’s largest infrastructures.

For more details about my work, please see my Publications and Conference Presentations.