Clouds with solid foundations
OpenStack, CloudStack, Kubernetes, OpenShift, VMware, NSX, and Tanzu built on Linux, networks, storage, and real operational constraints.
Hello, I’m ZAP51
I build the layers beneath modern platforms.
I’m a Principal Architect, working across compute, virtualization, distributed storage, networking, reliability, security, and accelerated AI.
What I do
The system is the product.
I connect the layers that are usually discussed separately, then design for how they behave together under scale, failure, and change.
Reliability when it matters
SRE, automation, observability, incident handling, escalation, and security treated as architecture concerns from the beginning.
Infrastructure for AI
Accelerators, NVIDIA AI systems, vLLM, and large language model serving approached as platform engineering rather than a disconnected experiment.
Systems, security, software, motorcycles, and anything else that rewards a closer look. Primary sources stay close to every claim.
View all posts ↗Why I build Mattermost Team Edition for 1,000 users.
A practical response to the v11 free offering changes, written from operating a server with more than 500 users.
User ceiling1,000
Message historyNo product cap
Build trackLatest ESR
My workbench
Things I make and run.
Each part has a different job. Some run entirely in your browser, some are served from this host, and some live as public infrastructure elsewhere.
Browser tools
The ZAP51 Toolbox
Twenty one local-first utilities for networking, cryptography, certificates, encoding, text comparison, time, and everyday security work.
Small API
What’s my IP?
The IPv4 address observed directly by this Caddy server, available as plain text or JSON.
Builds
Mattermost Team Edition builds
Independent builds of the latest ESR for amd64 and arm64, with the packaged user limit set to 1000 and no product-imposed message history cap.
Infrastructure
Package mirrors
Public Linux distribution and recovery media mirrors managed for NxtGen.
Code and identity
Public work, signed identity
Source is split between GitHub and a self hosted Gitea instance. My ED25519 public key is available here too.
How this site is served
One live connection receipt.
Reading browser timing data
- Protocol
- Detecting
- Transport
- Reading
- Connect
- Reading
- TTFB
- Reading
- Transfer
- Reading
- Total
- Reading