Inside The AI Stack

Index

Everything published

30 resources across 10 pillars. This page is a navigation index for readers, which is why it is not itself in a search index — the pillar hubs it links to are the pages that deserve that.

4 resources

AI Engineering

Agents, RAG, model APIs, MCP, and evaluation in production.

Open AI Engineering
Guide

AI Agents in Production

What changes when an agent loop moves from a demo to production: hard limits, tool authorisation, failure handling, and knowing when an agent is the wrong shape entirely.

intermediate· 4 minLLMAgents
Guide

Production AI Application Architecture

How to structure an AI application so that a slow model, a failed tool call, or a bad retrieval degrades one part of the system instead of the whole request path.

intermediate· 6 minLLMRAG
Guide

RAG Architecture Guide

A working guide to retrieval-augmented generation: how to chunk, how to evaluate retrieval separately from generation, and how to diagnose a bad answer in the right order.

intermediate· 5 minRAGEmbeddings
Guide

The AI Stack Explained

A layer-by-layer map of the modern AI stack, what each layer is actually responsible for, and where production systems tend to break in practice.

foundational· 8 minLLMKubernetes

3 resources

AI Infrastructure

GPUs, interconnects, storage, inference and training platforms.

Open AI Infrastructure
Guide

AI Networking Fundamentals

Collective communication, RDMA, and rail topology explained from the operator's side, including why adding nodes to a training job can make it slower.

advanced· 4 minRDMAInfiniBand
Guide

GPU Infrastructure for AI

What determines accelerator performance in production: memory capacity versus bandwidth, interconnect topology, and the checks that find a misplaced workload.

advanced· 6 minGPUNVIDIA
Guide

Storage Architecture for AI

Dataset streaming, checkpoint bursts, and model loading place completely different demands on storage. Designing for one and getting the others wrong is the usual outcome.

advanced· 4 minStorageNVMe

6 resources

DevOps & Platform

Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, Linux, and observability.

Open DevOps & Platform
Guide

Container Startup Troubleshooting

Exec format errors, permission denied, missing commands, bad entrypoints, immediate exits, and CrashLoopBackOff — diagnosed as one family rather than a page per error string.

intermediate· 4 minDockerContainers
Guide

Docker Production Engineering

Building container images for production: reproducible builds, correct signal handling, non-root runtime, layer strategy, and keeping secrets out of image history.

intermediate· 4 minDockerContainers
Guide

Kubernetes Workload Troubleshooting

A single diagnostic path for workloads that will not schedule, will not stay up, or keep getting evicted — driven by events and previous logs rather than guesswork.

intermediate· 3 minKubernetes
Guide

Production Kubernetes Operations

The operational settings that decide whether a workload survives a node failure or a rollout: requests and limits, the three probes, disruption budgets, and scheduling.

intermediate· 4 minKubernetesContainers
Guide

Terraform Production Practices

Running Terraform against production infrastructure: reviewing the plan mechanically, containing blast radius, structuring state, and avoiding the destroys nobody noticed.

intermediate· 4 minTerraformOpenTofu
Guide

Terraform State Operations

The state commands that are genuinely dangerous, what each one actually does, and how to run them with a way back.

advanced· 3 minTerraformOpenTofu

2 resources

Cloud & OpenStack

Private cloud operations, with depth in OpenStack.

Open Cloud & OpenStack
Guide

Kolla-Ansible Production Architecture

How Kolla-Ansible actually structures an OpenStack deployment, where configuration comes from, and how to make changes without discovering them during an outage.

expert· 3 minOpenStackKolla-Ansible
Guide

OpenStack Production Operations

Operating OpenStack in production: service state versus status, the message bus, placement disagreements, and the quiet failures that keep dashboards green.

expert· 3 minOpenStackNova

2 resources

AI Operations

Incident response, diagnosis, and the operations workbench.

Open AI Operations
Guide

Incident Diagnosis Method

A repeatable method for diagnosing production failures: form hypotheses the evidence supports, order checks by what they eliminate, and know when to stop and mitigate.

intermediate· 5 minIncident ResponseObservability
Guide

Production Observability

Building observability that shortens incidents rather than producing dashboards: what to instrument, how to alert on symptoms, and why cardinality decides your bill.

intermediate· 4 minPrometheusGrafana

5 resources

Academy

Structured learning paths for production engineers.

Open Academy
Learning path

OpenStack Production Engineer

A sequenced learning path for engineers who operate OpenStack in production — architecture, service-by-service depth, deployment, and troubleshooting under pressure.

intermediate· 5 minOpenStackNova
Lesson

Control Plane Architecture

How OpenStack services communicate, why the message bus and database are the real dependencies, and what each service actually owns.

foundational· 45 minOpenStackRabbitMQ
LessonPro

Kolla Configuration

Where OpenStack configuration actually comes from in a Kolla-Ansible deployment, how overrides are merged, and how to scope a change so it does not touch the whole cloud.

intermediate· 40 minOpenStackKolla-Ansible
LessonPro

Nova Scheduling

How Nova decides where an instance runs, what the filter chain does, and how to find which filter eliminated every host.

intermediate· 50 minOpenStackNova
Lesson

Service State and Liveness

Status versus state, how liveness is actually determined, and why a service that is enabled and down is the most dangerous row in any OpenStack listing.

foundational· 35 minOpenStackNova

3 resources

Runbooks

Operational procedures with validation and rollback.

Open Runbooks
Runbook

Cinder — No Valid Backend

Diagnose and remediate OpenStack volume creation failures caused by the scheduler having no candidate backends, including the case where the API reports healthy.

expert· 20 minOpenStackCinder
Runbook

CrashLoopBackOff Triage

A structured procedure for a pod that will not stay running, covering exit-code classification, probe-induced restarts, OOM kills, and validation that the fix held.

intermediate· 15 minKubernetes
Runbook

Linux Disk Pressure Response

Find what is consuming a full filesystem, reclaim space safely including the deleted-but-open-file case, and validate before the host causes wider failures.

intermediate· 15 minLinuxKubernetes

3 resources

Labs

Scenario-based incident practice with real signals.

Open Labs
Lab

Lab: CrashLoopBackOff

A service crash-looping after a routine config change, with logs that show a normal startup and no error anywhere. Work out what is killing it.

intermediate· 25 minKubernetes
Lab

Lab: Nova NoValidHost

Instances stopped building on a cloud with visible free capacity. Work the evidence, form hypotheses, and find why the scheduler has no candidates.

expert· 35 minOpenStackNova
Lab

Lab: Destructive Plan Review

A routine-looking Terraform pull request. Find the changes that would destroy data before you approve it, and work out which one is not what it appears to be.

intermediate· 20 minTerraformAWS

2 resources

Research

Original measurement and analysis of the AI stack.

Open Research
Research

AI Infrastructure Operations Survey

A planned survey of how teams actually operate AI infrastructure in production — what breaks, what is measured, and where engineering time goes. Not yet conducted.

foundational· 2 minAI InfrastructureGPU
Research

GPU Cloud Price Index

A planned recurring measurement of accelerator pricing across cloud providers, normalised so the comparison is meaningful. Methodology published before data collection begins.

foundational· 2 minGPUCloud