About

I'm Blake Ridgway, a site reliability engineer at Advanced Management Services and the founder of Arcline IT. I work on the layers everything else quietly depends on: reliability, cloud infrastructure, the networks underneath it, and the automation that keeps them in step. I've worked in infrastructure since 2015.

Most of it has been somewhere that being down is expensive — a regulated crypto custody platform, banks and credit unions, an insurance company, healthcare, Air Force training bases — which is where I picked up the habit of writing things down.

What I work on

Cloud and platform. Azure mostly, with AWS alongside it: VMs, storage and compute, virtual networks and peering, VPN gateways, ExpressRoute, NSGs. Built through Terraform, Ansible, Pulumi and ARM templates rather than by hand, with Kubernetes and Argo CD where it earns its keep — so configuration drift is a bug rather than a Tuesday.

Networking. The part I actually enjoy. BGP and OSPF, VLAN segmentation, SD-WAN, MPLS, VPN and remote access, 802.1X, and firewall policy with geo-location rules across pfSense, Cisco, Fortinet, Aruba and Meraki — plus the physical side, cabling included, because that's where the interesting failures live.

Observability and reliability. SLIs and SLOs that mean something, Prometheus and Grafana for the systems I run, Azure Monitor and CloudWatch for the ones I don't. On-call, incident response, and post-mortems written so the next person doesn't have to rediscover the failure.

Security and compliance. Least privilege as the default: identity and access management, RBAC and key management, endpoint and EDR tooling, vulnerability assessment and remediation. The compliance side is the same work seen from the auditor's chair — SOC 2, PCI DSS and HIPAA controls turned into evidence a system produces on its own, rather than a folder assembled the week before the audit.

Arcline

Arcline is the company I founded: site reliability for regulated SaaS. Reliable, cheaper, and audit-ready.

Arcline runs reliability, cost, and compliance engineering for SaaS teams that answer to an auditor. One week to find out what your platform really costs you. A retainer to keep it honest.

That breaks into three engagements: a fixed-price reliability and cost audit, fractional SRE, and audit-ready platform work — SOC 2, PCI DSS or HIPAA controls implemented in Terraform and Kubernetes, with evidence an auditor can verify. It is deliberately hands-on and fixed-price; I scope and deliver the work personally.

How I got here

I started in IT operations — virtualisation clusters, Cisco ASA policy, patching, backup and recovery — then spent a few years at an MSP looking after network infrastructure for banks and credit unions. From there: building a zero-touch provisioning system (PXE plus Ansible) for Air Force training bases across classified and mixed military/civilian environments, systems administration for a 50–200 user environment, and platform engineering on multi-cloud infrastructure for a fintech platform under high-availability SLAs.

Somewhere in the middle of that I spent five years building a Linux distribution of my own (Sailex) — services, tooling, the lot, and a fair amount of x86 assembly. I eventually shelved it once it was clear the market was saturated and the maths didn't work.

Formally: an IT program at Autry Technology Center, some computer science at SNHU, CompTIA Network+, Fortinet FCF and FCA Cybersecurity. The CKA is in progress.

About this site

This site is a small Rails application. Posts are markdown files in git, parsed at boot and served straight out of memory; there's no database anywhere in the read path. Publishing is a commit, and retracting something is git revert.

That's deliberate. No CMS to maintain, no build pipeline to babysit, and nothing sitting in a table waiting to be leaked.