Ember McIntyre is a Principal Site Reliability Engineer specializing in automation and Azure architecture. Their career in technology began at the physical layer, pulling cable for a turnkey VAR before moving into networking and unified communications, earning Cisco certifications along the way. From there, they expanded into compute, storage, and Active Directory before teaching themselves Azure and eventually focusing on architecture and automation.
Today, Ember is most interested in building automation systems that make complex infrastructure feel simple. Their server lifecycle automation brings together technologies including Ansible Automation Platform, Terraform, Azure DevOps, Azure, Git, vCenter, and Keeper. The combination of infrastructure as code and configuration as code fundamentally changed how they thought about infrastructure, moving server definitions out of individual systems and into code that could be versioned, reviewed, and automated.
Their philosophy is straightforward: human brains are for big problems, not boring click ops. Ember believes the best technology is frictionless and nearly invisible to the people using it, and they see self-service as an increasingly important part of infrastructure automation.
Ember credits much of their career to a willingness to keep learning and adapting. Technology doesn't stay the same for long, so neither can the people working with it. They're particularly proud of the journey that took them from pulling cable to designing enterprise automation systems.
Outside of technology, Ember is an avid practitioner of Historical European Martial Arts (HEMA), primarily focusing on longsword after starting with a background in Olympic épée fencing. They have also trained in Latosa Escrima, boxing, kickboxing, staff, montante, messer, dagger, and kendo. For Ember, martial arts and engineering share a common principle: master the fundamentals, then learn how to adapt them to the problem in front of you.
