About
About Me
I’m Robert Bennett — I lead a DevOps and infrastructure engineering team in the banking industry, based out of Nashville, Tennessee.
I’m responsible for the strategy and execution of infrastructure automation, observability, and platform engineering at a regulated financial institution. That covers a lot of ground — on-prem data centers, hybrid cloud, Kubernetes, CI/CD, monitoring, compliance automation — and it means my team has to make technology decisions that balance innovation with the realities of a regulated environment. We don’t get to move fast and break things. We move deliberately and keep things running.
I came up through the technical side. Before I was setting strategy and leading a team, I was the one writing automation, troubleshooting outages at 2 AM, and building the systems I now oversee. That background matters — I still think like an engineer, even when the job is about architecture, people, and process. I believe the best infrastructure leaders stay close enough to the technology to know when a vendor is selling smoke, and close enough to the business to explain why the investment matters.
I’m a Nutanix Technology Champion (2026) and hold certifications across Nutanix, Azure, and VMware.
What I Focus On
Infrastructure Automation — My team treats infrastructure like software. Everything is codified, version-controlled, peer-reviewed, and deployed through pipelines. We use Terraform, Ansible, and Git-based workflows across our entire stack — on-prem, cloud, and the networking and compute layers in between. The goal isn’t just automation for its own sake; it’s repeatability, auditability, and reducing the blast radius when something goes wrong.
Observability — We’re building a modern, Kubernetes-native observability platform on private infrastructure. Logs, metrics, dashboards, and alerting — all running on-prem because that’s where our workloads are. Most content on this topic assumes you’re in AWS or Azure with managed services. We’re solving the same problems with different constraints, and those constraints shape the architecture in ways worth writing about.
We also do multi-vendor storage and network observability across the data center, because when you run hardware from multiple manufacturers, a single pane of glass isn’t a luxury — it’s a necessity.
AI in Operations — We’re experimenting with using AI to reduce noise in log analysis and alerting. The approach is tiered — local models handle triage, a routing layer manages cost and complexity, and more capable models handle the hard problems. It’s early, it’s practical, and it’s aimed at a real operational pain point: too many alerts, not enough signal.
Compliance and Governance — In banking, you don’t just build infrastructure — you prove it’s configured correctly. We automate compliance reporting and CMDB accuracy so that when auditors ask questions, the answers are current and backed by data, not spreadsheets someone updated last quarter.
Platform Engineering — Running stateful workloads on Kubernetes in production, database-backed services with real upgrade and testing strategies, and building internal platforms that let other teams ship faster without bypassing the guardrails that keep the organization safe.
About This Blog
Pipelines and Pizza started because I kept running into the same problem: the content I needed didn’t exist.
Most DevOps and infrastructure content assumes a cloud-native, greenfield environment with no compliance requirements and unlimited budget. That’s not the world most of us work in. My world is hybrid infrastructure, change advisory boards, multi-vendor data centers, and systems that have to keep running while you modernize them.
So I started writing the posts I wished I’d had — practical, production-tested, and honest about the parts that are hard.
What You’ll Find Here
Foundational content — Git workflows, Terraform fundamentals, Ansible from scratch, cloud basics. The blog started here because everyone on my team needed these skills, and I wanted a resource I could point new engineers to. These posts assume you’re smart but might be new to the tooling.
Architecture and strategy — How to think about hybrid infrastructure, observability platform design, automation strategy, and the decisions that shape how your team operates. Not just what to build, but why you’d build it that way and what trade-offs you’re accepting.
On-prem and hybrid patterns — Managing infrastructure that spans a data center and a cloud provider. Dealing with the realities of hardware you own, vendors you manage, and compliance you can’t ignore. Not everything lives in the cloud, and the people working in these environments deserve good content.
Career and leadership — I went from writing automation to leading the team that writes it. The skills that got me here aren’t the same ones I need now — and that transition is worth writing about honestly. How to grow engineers, how to make the case for investment, and how to stay technical while your calendar fills up with meetings.
Who This Blog Is For
If you work in infrastructure — especially in a regulated industry, a hybrid environment, or an organization that’s modernizing without starting from scratch — this blog is for you. Whether you’re an engineer getting started with DevOps, a team lead trying to drive adoption in an organization that’s never done it, or a senior leader looking for someone who’s navigating the same challenges, there’s something here.
Connect With Me
If you have questions, topic ideas, or just want to compare notes on running infrastructure in a regulated environment, reach out on LinkedIn. I’m always happy to talk shop.