About

I write about infrastructure engineering, platform automation, and the unglamorous work of bridging legacy networks with modern cloud-native stacks — because that gap is where most of the real problems live.

About the Author

I’m Ronaldo Dantas, a Senior Data Center Expert and Enterprise Architect based in São Paulo, Brazil, with 32 years in IT — 25 of them at the same organization, across multiple generations of its name and technology stack.

I’ve spent most of my career deep inside enterprise infrastructure: The kind of complex multi-tenant data center environments that don’t show up in tutorial demos. That background is both my foundation and my lens.

More recently, I’ve been deliberately expanding into Platform Engineering — Terraform, Kubernetes, AWS, Go — not to abandon what I know, but because the most interesting problems right now sit exactly at the intersection of traditional infrastructure expertise and modern automation tooling.

This blog is where I think out loud about that intersection.

My Journey

I started in IT when networks were physical and “the cloud” meant someone else’s problem. I grew up professionally configuring Cisco gear, designing data center topologies, and managing infrastructure that organizations genuinely depended on.

Over time, I accumulated deep specializations — Cisco ACI field engineering, Red Hat OpenStack, enterprise security architecture — and a growing frustration with how slowly infrastructure practices were evolving compared to the rest of software engineering.

That frustration became curiosity, and curiosity became a deliberate pivot. I started learning Terraform, Go, and Kubernetes — not as a career restart, but as an extension. The result is a hybrid profile that’s still relatively rare: someone who can read a fabric topology and write the IaC that provisions it.

Today I’m building open-source tools, writing a technical book on Terraform for Cisco ACI, and looking for senior Platform Engineering roles where that full-stack infrastructure depth actually matters.

Skills

Networking & Data Center Cisco ACI · NetDevOps · Service Provider · NX-OS · SD-WAN · F5 GSLB/DNS · Cisco FTD · Enterprise security architecture · Multi-tenant DC design

Operating Systems & Infrastructure I’ve been working with Unix systems since 1996 — before Linux was a serious enterprise contender. Today that foundation extends across Linux distributions in production environments, container runtimes, and the low-level OS behavior that most cloud engineers only encounter when something breaks at 2 AM. Thirty years of that muscle memory doesn’t go away; it just becomes pattern recognition.

Cloud & Automation AWS · Azure · GCP · Terraform · Kubernetes · GitHub · CI/CD pipelines

Programming Go (Cobra, AWS SDK v2) · Python · Infrastructure as Code · PowerShell · Shell

Leadership & Communication Over three decades in enterprise IT, I’ve learned that technical depth only goes so far. I’ve mentored engineers transitioning into network and cloud specializations, led cross-functional infrastructure teams, and spoken at internal and external technical events. One of the things I care most about — and the reason this blog exists — is translating complex infrastructure concepts into language that non-specialists can act on. Architecture decisions only stick when the people implementing them actually understand why.

Currently building

  • InfraMirror — A Go CLI that scans AWS infrastructure and generates Terraform HCL
  • ShowInt.ai — An AIOps tool for network fault analysis using LLMs
  • Terraform for Cisco ACI — A technical book for senior network engineers transitioning to IaC

Contact Me

The best way to reach me is email. I’m also reasonably responsive on GitHub if you’ve found a bug or want to contribute to one of the projects.