Engineering guides, production infrastructure, hands-on labs, and AI-powered operations tools for the systems behind modern AI.https://insidetheaistack.com/en-UShttps://insidetheaistack.com/ai-engineering/ai-agents-in-production/https://insidetheaistack.com/ai-engineering/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. [Awaiting technical review]Mon, 24 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTarticlesLLMAgentsMCPhttps://insidetheaistack.com/ai-infrastructure/ai-networking-fundamentals/https://insidetheaistack.com/ai-infrastructure/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. [Awaiting technical review]Mon, 24 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTarticlesRDMAInfiniBandNetworkingNCCLhttps://insidetheaistack.com/devops/docker/container-startup-troubleshooting/https://insidetheaistack.com/devops/docker/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. [Awaiting technical review]Mon, 24 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTarticlesDockerContainersKuberneteshttps://insidetheaistack.com/devops/docker/docker-production-engineering/https://insidetheaistack.com/devops/docker/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. [Awaiting technical review]Mon, 24 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTarticlesDockerContainersOCIhttps://insidetheaistack.com/ai-infrastructure/gpu-infrastructure-for-ai-workloads/https://insidetheaistack.com/ai-infrastructure/gpu-infrastructure-for-ai-workloads/What determines accelerator performance in production: memory capacity versus bandwidth, interconnect topology, and the checks that find a misplaced workload. [Awaiting technical review]Mon, 24 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTarticlesGPUNVIDIACUDAKuberneteshttps://insidetheaistack.com/operations/incident-diagnosis-method/https://insidetheaistack.com/operations/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. [Awaiting technical review]Mon, 24 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTarticlesIncident ResponseObservabilityhttps://insidetheaistack.com/cloud/openstack/kolla-ansible-production-architecture/https://insidetheaistack.com/cloud/openstack/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. [Awaiting technical review]Mon, 24 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTarticlesOpenStackKolla-AnsibleAnsibleDockerhttps://insidetheaistack.com/devops/kubernetes/kubernetes-workload-troubleshooting/https://insidetheaistack.com/devops/kubernetes/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. [Awaiting technical review]Mon, 24 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTarticlesKuberneteshttps://insidetheaistack.com/cloud/openstack/openstack-production-operations/https://insidetheaistack.com/cloud/openstack/openstack-production-operations/Operating OpenStack in production: service state versus status, the message bus, placement disagreements, and the quiet failures that keep dashboards green. [Awaiting technical review]Mon, 24 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTarticlesOpenStackNovaNeutronCinderRabbitMQhttps://insidetheaistack.com/ai-engineering/production-ai-application-architecture/https://insidetheaistack.com/ai-engineering/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. [Awaiting technical review]Mon, 24 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTarticlesLLMRAGArchitecturehttps://insidetheaistack.com/devops/kubernetes/production-kubernetes-operations/https://insidetheaistack.com/devops/kubernetes/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. [Awaiting technical review]Mon, 24 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTarticlesKubernetesContainershttps://insidetheaistack.com/operations/production-observability-engineering/https://insidetheaistack.com/operations/production-observability-engineering/Building observability that shortens incidents rather than producing dashboards: what to instrument, how to alert on symptoms, and why cardinality decides your bill. [Awaiting technical review]Mon, 24 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTarticlesPrometheusGrafanaOpenTelemetryObservabilityhttps://insidetheaistack.com/ai-engineering/rag-architecture-guide/https://insidetheaistack.com/ai-engineering/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. [Awaiting technical review]Mon, 24 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTarticlesRAGEmbeddingsLLMhttps://insidetheaistack.com/ai-infrastructure/storage-architecture-for-ai/https://insidetheaistack.com/ai-infrastructure/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. [Awaiting technical review]Mon, 24 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTarticlesStorageNVMeCephAI Infrastructurehttps://insidetheaistack.com/devops/terraform/terraform-production-practices/https://insidetheaistack.com/devops/terraform/terraform-production-practices/Running Terraform against production infrastructure: reviewing the plan mechanically, containing blast radius, structuring state, and avoiding the destroys nobody noticed. [Awaiting technical review]Mon, 24 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTarticlesTerraformOpenTofuIaChttps://insidetheaistack.com/devops/terraform/terraform-state-operations/https://insidetheaistack.com/devops/terraform/terraform-state-operations/The state commands that are genuinely dangerous, what each one actually does, and how to run them with a way back. [Awaiting technical review]Mon, 24 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTarticlesTerraformOpenTofuIaChttps://insidetheaistack.com/ai-engineering/the-ai-stack-explained/https://insidetheaistack.com/ai-engineering/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. [Awaiting technical review]Mon, 24 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTarticlesLLMKubernetesGPURAGhttps://insidetheaistack.com/runbooks/openstack/cinder-scheduler-no-valid-backend/https://insidetheaistack.com/runbooks/openstack/cinder-scheduler-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. [Awaiting technical review]Mon, 24 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTrunbooksOpenStackCinderCephhttps://insidetheaistack.com/runbooks/kubernetes/kubernetes-crashloopbackoff-triage/https://insidetheaistack.com/runbooks/kubernetes/kubernetes-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. [Awaiting technical review]Mon, 24 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTrunbooksKuberneteshttps://insidetheaistack.com/runbooks/linux/linux-disk-pressure-response/https://insidetheaistack.com/runbooks/linux/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. [Awaiting technical review]Mon, 24 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTrunbooksLinuxKuberneteshttps://insidetheaistack.com/labs/kubernetes-crashloopbackoff/https://insidetheaistack.com/labs/kubernetes-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. [Awaiting technical review]Mon, 24 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTlabsKuberneteshttps://insidetheaistack.com/labs/openstack-nova-novalidhost/https://insidetheaistack.com/labs/openstack-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. [Awaiting technical review]Mon, 24 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTlabsOpenStackNovaPlacementhttps://insidetheaistack.com/labs/terraform-destructive-plan-review/https://insidetheaistack.com/labs/terraform-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. [Awaiting technical review]Mon, 24 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTlabsTerraformAWShttps://insidetheaistack.com/academy/openstack-production-engineer/https://insidetheaistack.com/academy/openstack-production-engineer/A sequenced learning path for engineers who operate OpenStack in production — architecture, service-by-service depth, deployment, and troubleshooting under pressure. [Awaiting technical review]Mon, 24 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTtracksOpenStackNovaNeutronCinderKolla-Ansiblehttps://insidetheaistack.com/academy/openstack-production-engineer/openstack-control-plane-architecture/https://insidetheaistack.com/academy/openstack-production-engineer/openstack-control-plane-architecture/How OpenStack services communicate, why the message bus and database are the real dependencies, and what each service actually owns. [Awaiting technical review]Mon, 24 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTlessonsOpenStackRabbitMQMariaDBhttps://insidetheaistack.com/academy/openstack-production-engineer/openstack-kolla-configuration/https://insidetheaistack.com/academy/openstack-production-engineer/openstack-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. [Awaiting technical review]Mon, 24 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTlessonsOpenStackKolla-AnsibleAnsiblehttps://insidetheaistack.com/academy/openstack-production-engineer/openstack-nova-scheduling/https://insidetheaistack.com/academy/openstack-production-engineer/openstack-nova-scheduling/How Nova decides where an instance runs, what the filter chain does, and how to find which filter eliminated every host. [Awaiting technical review]Mon, 24 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTlessonsOpenStackNovaPlacementhttps://insidetheaistack.com/academy/openstack-production-engineer/openstack-service-state-and-liveness/https://insidetheaistack.com/academy/openstack-production-engineer/openstack-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. [Awaiting technical review]Mon, 24 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTlessonsOpenStackNovaNeutronhttps://insidetheaistack.com/research/ai-infrastructure-operations-survey/https://insidetheaistack.com/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. [Awaiting technical review]Mon, 24 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTresearchAI InfrastructureGPUhttps://insidetheaistack.com/research/gpu-cloud-price-index/https://insidetheaistack.com/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. [Awaiting technical review]Mon, 24 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTresearchGPUCloudAI Infrastructure