Designed and built one of the largest search indexing clusters for a global media intelligence company — 52 bare-metal nodes in Network Redux’s private cloud. Completed over a single weekend, in between flights from Portland to Kochi.
Context
A global media intelligence company needed a large-scale Elasticsearch cluster for search indexing, deployed on dedicated bare-metal infrastructure in a private cloud environment. The project required end-to-end delivery — from network architecture through OS provisioning to production handover — on an aggressive timeline.
What I Did
- Designed a dedicated DMZ zone for the Elasticsearch environment within Juniper SRX firewall clusters
- Configured Arista switches with VLANs for network segmentation and isolation
- Deployed 52 bare-metal instances with CentOS, security hardening, and client-specific customizations
- Implemented zero-touch OS installation using PXE boot for consistent, repeatable provisioning
- Built Ansible playbooks for all OS-level configurations across all 52 nodes
- Oversaw full documentation and structured handover to the operations team
Results
| Metric | Detail |
|---|---|
| Nodes deployed | 52 bare-metal instances |
| Delivery time | Single weekend |
| Scale | One of the largest search indexing clusters for the client |
| Provisioning | Zero-touch — fully automated via PXE + Ansible |
Stack
Elasticsearch · Bare Metal · CentOS · PXE Boot · Ansible · Juniper SRX · Arista Switches · Private Cloud