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About

Me in 10 Seconds

Alex Kraker

  • Name: Alex Kraker
  • Age: 41
  • Occupation: Linux & Cloud Security Engineer
  • Employer: I work @ Peraton
  • Location: Tulsa, OK
  • Dependents: 1 dog “Feather”, 1 cat “Thomas O’Malley” (aka “Tom”)

Me Professionally

The majority of my professional background in tech is as a Linux Sysadmin. Currently, my day-to-day is focused on Linux Security Engineering working on federal infrastructure as a government contractor. My bread-and-butter is Ansible for managing infrastructure on various platforms, mostly different flavors of Enterprise Linux and Windows Server. I’ve also worked with various “Infrastructure as Code” and CI/CD tools: Terraform, Packer, Ansible Automation Platform, GitLab CI… just to name a few that I’m relatively well-versed in.

My engineering mindset

I’m a whole-systems thinker and I truly enjoy the challenge of wrapping my head around large infrastructure systems and bringing order to complexity. I tend to work from first principles and my “MO” is to always try to build robust, repeatable, and fault-tolerant solutions that scale. It’s first-order problem solving and solving problems not just once but categorically for all (or at least “most”) cases. Modularity, code-reuse, well-architected design patterns, and idempotency. Automate away the toil, and build and share useful tools other engineers use.

What I’m currently working on…

Right now I’m writing a study guide for the Red Hat Certified System Administrator (RHCSA) exam (EX200):

“The RHCSA Field Manual: A Hands-on Guide to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 and the EX200 Exam” (working title)
Working manuscript

This was a natural evolution of The RHCSA Study Guide that was collated with the help of AI to help me study for the exam. To my complete surprise, this has become a relatively popular resource circulated among the ProLUG Discord community and the RHEL 9 to RHEL 10 update has become my most reposted LinkedIn post. Clearly this struck a chord.

In contrast to the RHCSA study repo, the book content will be written by me the old-fashioned way (typed by hand), rather than being AI generated. I wouldn’t feel good about putting my name on something that wasn’t authored by me and I doubt anybody would want to read an AI-generated textbook anyway.