About

I'm Max Hennessy, a Senior IT Engineer based in London. I've been working in infrastructure and cloud operations inside media companies for the better part of a decade.

The work spans a lot of ground: identity and access management, cloud migrations, PAM tooling, endpoint fleet management, and generally keeping the lights on for smaller than average teams for enviorments that should have bigger teams.

I write here about what that work actually looks like in practice. Practical notes, not vendor white papers or theoretical architectures. What you run into when you're moving 2.7 petabytes of media content, swapping out a PAM tool across an enterprise, or trying to get Terraform to behave sensibly across a live AWS org.

Background

I've worked across the full stack in media environments: bare metal and virtualisation (Hyper-V, VMware), networking (Meraki), AWS (IAM, SSM, S3, Identity Centre), endpoint management (JAMF, Kandji), identity (Okta, CyberArk, BeyondTrust), and Terraform for IaC at scale.

The name

Mallee is an Australian shrub that grows in the harshest conditions drought, heat, wildfire. It survives where nothing else does. Burn it to the ground and it comes back from the roots. That's the work this site is about. Foundational, resilient, built correctly from the ground up done once.