Philipp Lehmann

Infrastructure engineer · Bochum, Germany · @PhilippTheServer

I like building infrastructure, mostly so I can break it again.

I am CTO at Nerd Force1 UG, part of the AI-Gruppe umbrella brand, and a B.Sc. student of IT Security at Ruhr University Bochum. I run self-hosted systems, container platforms and internal services — usually at the scale where a bad decision gets expensive before it gets noticed.

Most of my time goes into:

• Running container-heavy infrastructure
• Automating everything that shouldn't be done twice
• Designing systems that survive bad ideas and worse deployments

What I run

Since 2022 I have designed, deployed and operated production infrastructure, from bare-metal server architecture through container orchestration and automation pipelines up to the full-stack internal tooling that sits on top of it.

• Docker standalone cluster — carries the bulk of company workloads
• Kubernetes cluster — orchestrated workloads, deployed with ArgoCD
• Ceph cluster — distributed storage across bare metal
• Internal network — a NetBird overlay mesh and Bind9 DNS, all of it as code

The rule I hold everything to: if a host cannot be rebuilt from the repository, it does not count as running. There is no configuration living only in someone’s shell history.

Writing

I write things down after I have learned them the expensive way. The full set is under Writing; these three are where I would start.

• A host you cannot rebuild is not running

  Infrastructure as code is not a tool choice, it is a rule about where truth lives — and the temptation to break it always arrives at three in the morning.

  AnsibleTerraformLinux

• Ceph without a vendor's price list

  Replicated storage across ordinary machines instead of one expensive box with a support contract — and the four failure modes that only show up once you are already unhappy.

  CephStorage

• Alert on symptoms, not on metrics

  The outages nobody catches are the ones where every metric is green. What to do about the failures that live between healthy components.

  MonitoringAlerting

Everything I have written →

Community

I hold the Executive Office at open Skunkforce e.V., where I lead a small developer team and coordinate the association’s open-source work. Once a year we host the emBO++ embedded systems conference and KiCon in Bochum.

What’s next

Large-scale infrastructure design. I want to learn how to design and build data centres from scratch — and no, I have no idea how much of a pain that is going to be. It looks like a good problem anyway.

Elsewhere

• Email philipp.lehmann@gruppe.ai
• GitHub PhilippTheServer
• LinkedIn philipp-lehmann
• ORCID 0009-0002-3922-2471