RavenForge

RavenForge is the work of London Clawson — a Web Systems Administrator and DevOps engineer based in Tampa Bay, Florida.

I build and maintain Linux infrastructure for enterprise ecommerce. That means Rocky Linux servers across development, staging, and production environments; Ansible playbooks that automate everything from provisioning to patching; and the observability stack — ELK, Checkmk, Grafana — that keeps hundreds of hosts visible. I’ve replaced managed Elastic Cloud deployments with self-hosted ELK stacks to cut tens of thousands in annual licensing. I’ve built OKD clusters with Rook/Ceph storage, Istio service mesh, and MetalLB load balancing. I’ve rolled out Duo 2FA across entire server fleets with a single Ansible run. And I carry a pager for 24/7 production support, because that’s what the work requires.

My day-to-day toolbox: Ansible, Bash, Python, and PowerShell for automation. Rocky Linux 8–10 and RHEL for the OS layer. AWS (EC2, S3, IAM) and VMware vSphere for compute. Apache, Docker, and OKD for the application layer. I hold a CompTIA Security+ and AWS Cloud Practitioner certification, and I’m completing a B.S. in Computer Science through BYU-Idaho.

RavenForge Press is where I turn that production experience into something other administrators can use. Every guide starts from real infrastructure work — Duo 2FA deployments, ELK stack builds, Grafana monitoring setups, Postfix relay configurations — and gets packaged into a walkthrough you can follow step by step or adapt to your own environment. The free guides on this site cover the concepts and procedures. The paid playbooks on the store give you the production-ready Ansible code you can drop straight into your infrastructure.

The name comes from two places. The raven is from falconry — a bird you don’t tame, you build a working relationship with. That’s how I think about infrastructure: you don’t control it, you learn to work with it. The forge is from blacksmithing — raw material shaped into something useful through heat, repetition, and patience. That’s the work, whether it’s an Ansible playbook or a production deployment.