Production operation of a DPI/DPDK stack - NIC↔PCI mapping, VFIO binding, port/link diagnostics, and Ansible-driven server configs. Boring deploys = uptime.
NIC ↔ PCI ↔ VFIO bindings drifted between hosts. Manual config edits caused outages. Service startup was a 50/50 lottery on a fresh box.
Built a discipline: deterministic NIC↔PCI mapping per host, clean VFIO binding, port/link sanity checks before service start. Wrapped server config in Ansible - idempotent playbooks, no SSH-and-vim.
Repeatable, reproducible deploys. Service startup time and false-fail rate dropped. Triage was compressed into a checklist any on-call can run at 3 AM.
DPDK ops is 80% hardware/PCI hygiene and 20% application. Make it boring with automation - boring is uptime.