Specht Labs

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About Me

About 630 wordsAbout 2 min

2025-03-28

Hi, I'm Cedric — but most people know me as cedi.

I'm a Senior Site Reliability Engineering and Tech Lead at Microsoft Azure, working on distributed systems, chaos engineering, and platform resilience at scale. If it's complex, distributed, and needs to stay up — I'm into it.

I specialize in building and maintaining large-scale distributed systems, driving reliability, and leading technical initiatives to improve platform resilience.

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🔧 What I Do

  • Building reliable, large-scale systems with a focus on resilience, SLOs, and automation
  • Leading teams and setting technical direction in high-stakes, high-scale environments
  • Designing chaos experiments, improving release workflows, and modernizing infrastructure
  • Evangelizing good SRE practices through talks, docs, and community work

🛠️ Community & Chaos

I regularly help with infrastructure, planning, and logistics for events like the Chaos Communication Congress. During the pandemic, I helped build:

  • jitsi.rocks - A collection of Jitsi Video Servers to stay connected
  • Open Infrastructure - A collective of people building desperately needed infrastructure for education institutions to keep classes going
  • The Kubernetes stack powering the rC3 - NOW HERE virtual workd

🧪 What I Tinker With

  • Home lab with Raspberry Pi K3s cluster, CEPH storage, and a Stratum 1 NTP/PTP time server
  • Cluster API managed cloud Kubernetes cluster running a full Grafana LGTM Stack
  • Kernel recompilation just for fun (and for weird hardware drivers)
  • Low-level distributed systems algorithms to explore gossip and consensus protocols

📸 When Not Writing YAML

I’m also a hobbyist analog photographer with a small collection of 35mm and medium format cameras (Leica M6, Hasselblad 500 c/m, Canon A1). I develop film at home and have a tiny darkroom with a 35mm enlarger.

💡 Things I Believe in

  • Be excellent to each other 🤝
  • Focus on fundamentals > chasing hype
  • Alert on symptoms, not vitals
  • Incidents are opportunities to learn
  • There is no single "root cause"
  • How Complex Systems Fail is required reading
  • Your beloved system architecture exists mostly in your head and behaves fails differently than you'd expect. (See the Above the line/below the line framework)

☕ Let’s Connect

GitHub Specht LabsMastodonInstagramLinkedIn

Experience
  • Technical Leadership & Mentorship
  • Key Stakeholder Management
  • Staff Training
  • Distributed Systems & Low-Level Systems Programming
  • Chaos Engineering & Resilience Testing
  • CI/CD & Deployment Orchestration
  • Infrastructure as Code