MyKE / About me

Created Sat, 24 Aug 2013 15:19:09 +0000
560 Words

About me

Hi, I’m Michael Sabrnak aka MyKE - a Staff Site Reliability Engineer at SolarWinds based in the Czech Republic, with 12+ years of hands-on experience across infrastructure, cloud, and platform engineering.

What I do

I build and maintain the platforms that keep engineering teams productive. My day-to-day revolves around Kubernetes (AWS EKS & on-prem), infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Ansible), CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, TeamCity, CircleCI), and observability - making sure things run, scale, and recover gracefully.

At SolarWinds I’m part of the internal EngOps / SRE team where we practice “drink your own champagne” - we rely on SolarWinds Observability (SWO) to monitor the very infrastructure we build. I’ve worked on projects ranging from managing Kubernetes clusters at scale, building self-service developer tooling, to designing alerting strategies that cut through the noise.

My journey

I started in IT back in 2013 as a computer engineer doing SMB outsourcing, then moved into system administration at VSB - Technical University of Ostrava where I managed Active Directory, Exchange, SQL clusters, Citrix, and VMware environments. From there I joined Tieto (now TietoEVRY) as a Windows Senior Technical Specialist and later Infrastructure Architect - automating everything I could touch with PowerShell and designing customer-facing infrastructure changes.

In 2019 I joined SolarWinds as a System Engineer and progressively moved into the SRE world: Site Reliability Engineer - Senior SRE - Staff SRE (since October 2023). Along the way the stack evolved from pure Windows Server into a hybrid world of Linux, containers, cloud, and GitOps - and I’ve enjoyed every step of that transition.

Speaking & community

In April 2024 I co-presented at THWACKcamp 2024 - SolarWinds’ annual virtual IT learning event - with a session called “It’s a Beautiful Day in the SWOC-erhood: Real World Applications of SolarWinds Observability”, showing how our EngOps team uses SWO for real, not just as a demo.

Beyond work

Outside of the office I’m a hands-on tinkerer. I run a Home Assistant setup with Zigbee devices, manage my home network on UniFi gear (previously MikroTik), play with Flipper Zero and hardware security, and keep a small fleet of Raspberry Pis running various services. I’m also a satellite TV hobbyist (Enigma2 / OScam) and I care about privacy - I self-host what I can and use tools like SimpleLogin to keep my digital footprint in check.

I’ve also been running Erebor - a Czech Ultima Online private server with a Lord of the Rings theme - from my home infrastructure since 2015. It’s a niche community for a classic game, but keeping it alive for 10+ years has been a fun long-running project. Behind the scenes it’s a full production setup - source control, automated deployments, centralized logging with ELK, a community wiki, and secure remote access for the admin team. I also maintain a UO tools archive with downloads and guides from the early days.

This blog

I’ve been writing here since 2013. The blog started as a personal knowledge base - quick fixes, troubleshooting notes, and scripts I needed to reference again. Over time it grew into 90+ posts across 43 categories, covering everything from Windows Server internals to Kubernetes networking to Flipper Zero hacks. The common thread: real problems, real solutions, no fluff.

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