Meet Jeleel Muibi: Building Infrastructure That Can Explain Its Failures

Jeleel Muibi is a platform and infrastructure engineer based in London. His work focuses on the intersection of cloud and on-premises infrastructure, specifically in networking, platform lifecycle, recovery, and the controls that ensure safety in repeated operations. He is the creator of HybridOps, an open-source infrastructure runtime that manages declared intent through policy, execution, verification, recovery, and teardown.

Outside of his work, Jeleel enjoys writing as a way to slow down and explain the reasons behind system behavior.

Jeleel's latest Hackernoon Top story is titled "The Deployment Failed. The Resources Are Still Running." The article explores a scenario where a deployment fails, but the resources it created remain active. The piece delves into state recording, pending work, recovery, and verified teardown, utilizing HybridOps Core and its regression path for partial provider mutation.

Jeleel typically writes about instances where infrastructure automation appears complete yet leaves an operational question unanswered. These topics often involve platform engineering, sources of truth, reproducibility, recovery, and the line between a useful tool and an operable platform. His writing process usually begins with a failure or unexpected behavior, which he then investigates through code and records.

He writes the opening and conclusion first, followed by a subtraction phase to eliminate unsupported claims and details.

The biggest challenge Jeleel faces when writing is scope. Infrastructure failures seldom involve a single issue, as they can encompass networking, identity, remote state, policy, and recovery within the same run. Balancing the need to provide context to readers without overwhelming them with platform details is crucial.

Jeleel's career aspiration is to make HybridOps a widely adopted open-source operating layer that engineers can use, question, and improve in real-world environments. His goal is to build a strong community around the project, collaborate with teams facing similar challenges, and share their insights through talks and industry engagement.

In his free time, Jeleel engages in hobbies that often evolve into technical pursuits. While writing was initially intended as a non-tech hobby, it has since merged with his professional interests. He finds solace in the quiet moments of writing, allowing ideas to settle and presenting them in a simple manner.

Regarding HackerNoon as a platform for writers, Jeleel appreciates that it allows practitioners to share their real implementations while maintaining a personal voice. The platform provides reach without forcing articles into product pitches or flattening the writer's style. Jeleel finds the editorial process valuable, as it enhances the presentation of his work and brings significant reach to his stories.

Jeleel concludes by emphasizing the importance of examining failure cases in infrastructure, as they often provide more valuable insights than successful paths. He thanks HackerNoon and its readers for their engagement with his article.