The unglamorous layer that carries everything else.
Internet Plumbing is the independent engineering practice of Eric Houston, based in Seattle. The focus is the part of the stack most people never see: the routing, switching, and systems plumbing underneath the applications — from the BGP fabric to the service mesh to the GPU that answers the prompt.
BGP, MPLS, and carrier-grade routing and switching, drawn from 25 years operating production networks on Arista, Cisco, and Juniper — plus reproducible containerlab fabrics (cEOS spine/leaf, gNMI telemetry) for testing designs before they touch hardware.
Bare-metal kubeadm clusters across mixed arm64/x86 nodes: CNI and pod/service routing, MetalLB load balancing, and self-hosted recursive DNS on Unbound with DoT, DoH, and DDR.
Hand-managed Istio: ingress gateways, TLS termination, and VirtualService traffic routing that keeps a fleet of services behind a single, source-controlled edge.
Argo CD app-of-apps, infrastructure as code, and CI/CD pipelines — declarative over imperative, source-controlled over live-edited, so the platform stays reproducible.
Self-hosted inference on Kubernetes: Ollama scheduled onto NVIDIA GPUs via the device plugin and a dedicated runtime class, exposed through the mesh — models that run entirely on-premises.
This page is informational. Internet Plumbing is a small practice, not a product — and it runs on the same bare-metal Kubernetes, Istio, and BGP plumbing described above. If the work is relevant to something you're building, you're welcome to get in touch.