Stefan Yasin
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The stack I actually run

Updated October 11, 2026No affiliate links, nothing sponsored

Everything here is in service of one thing: keeping systems observable and recoverable when nobody is standing in front of them. If a tool cannot be monitored, backed up, and restored, it does not earn a place.

Servers and virtualization

  • Dell PowerEdge hardware, still earning its keep on ESXi 6.7 rather than being replaced
  • VMware ESXi for the hypervisor layer, with VMs split by job: monitoring, storage, automation
  • Kubernetes for the workloads that benefit from it, including the agents that scrape and report
  • Docker for everything that does not need an orchestrator
  • NAS storage with offsite replication, and restore drills that get run instead of assumed

Networking

  • Cisco switching and routing, racked and cabled by hand
  • 40GbE backbone between the heavy hitters where the data actually moves
  • Tailscale for reaching the lab from anywhere without opening a port to the internet
  • Segmented networks for management, storage, and anything exposed

Monitoring and alerting

  • My own tooling, because the failure modes I care about are specific: endpointwatch, rackpulse, pinggrid, restore-drill
  • Severity tiers with one named owner per tier, and escalation that runs whether or not I am awake. The model is written up in this post
  • An outside-in heartbeat, so silence itself becomes an alert when the lab is the thing that died

Industrial and control systems

  • PLC platforms: Siemens, Omron, Schneider, Delta, Lenze
  • SCADA and HMI: Siemens WinCC and comparable HMI panels
  • Injection and blow molding lines, cap lining, grinders, drives and robotics integration
  • Plant services as one system: natural gas, compressed air, water, electrical, HVAC and chillers

Software and scripting

  • Python for automation, scraping, and the glue between systems
  • PowerShell and Bash for the unglamorous work that has to be repeatable
  • Windows Server and Linux in the same rack, because operations reality is mixed
  • AI models as a component, not a product: summarising, classifying, and explaining what changed

Home and lab automation

  • Z-Wave and Home Assistant for lighting, sensors, and whole-home control
  • A solar-supported lab, which is the most direct way to learn what a power event does to a workload
  • ESP32 and CAN bus for the hardware-level work that pure software people skip

How this page stays honest

Nothing on this page is an affiliate link and nothing is sponsored. If a tool leaves the stack, it leaves the page. Related reading: what a $0 home lab taught me about enterprise ops.

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