After 25+ years of building infrastructure for other people’s ideas, I decided it was time to give my own corner of the internet a proper deployment. Welcome aboard.

Who am I?

I’m Dominic D’Apice, a Developer working on Azure Infrastructure for AI in Montréal. My career started in 1998 in a server room, went through more than a decade of Linux system administration, a fleet of 1000+ servers, self-service cloud platforms in NERC-regulated environments - and today I build and operate the Azure and Databricks platforms that power AI workloads, with MLOps and DataOps practices baked in.

The common thread through all of it: anything done twice by hand deserves to be automated.

What will I write about here?

Field notes, mostly - the kind of practical, been-there articles I wish I had found when I hit these problems myself:

  • Ansible at scale - patching, standardizing, and keeping a large fleet sane
  • Azure & Databricks operations - clusters, jobs, pipelines, security, compliance
  • Azure DevOps → GitHub Actions migrations - lessons from moving pipelines over
  • MLOps / DataOps - what it takes to run models and data pipelines in production
  • Data science along the way - I’m finishing a University Certificate in Data Science and competing on Kaggle

And occasionally, because old habits die hard: astronomy. After a career of managing clouds, I still spend my clearest nights looking at the real ones. (It happened faster than expected - see the Vera Rubin Observatory read with infrastructure eyes and 49 years of Voyager 1 operations.)

Where to find me

My GitHub profile has the full mission telemetry - projects, stats, and one contribution-eating snake. You can also find me on LinkedIn and Kaggle.

Per aspera ad astra. 🚀