Founded on production experience.
Percival Systems LLC was founded in 2026 by John Radford, a DevOps engineer and systems administrator with 6+ years of experience running infrastructure for a production web hosting company.
From production hosting to Percival Systems
Before founding Percival Systems, John spent 6+ years at a production web hosting company, starting in support, moving into NOC and security work, and ultimately serving as a DevOps Specialist and Systems Administrator.
Along the way, he built internal tooling and automation spanning distributed KVM clusters, custom RAG pipelines, security systems, and business metrics platforms, always with an emphasis on clean, usable tools for the people who depend on them.
Percival Systems LLC exists to bring that same practical, full-stack approach to small and mid-sized organizations that need software built and infrastructure run, without the overhead of a large agency.
Selected work
Virtual Resource Manager
Built a Perl-based system spanning 30-40 host systems and thousands of guest VMs: per-host REST API agents broadcasting live stats, a weighted-average rebalancing algorithm, and an interactive REPL CLI for managing QEMU/KVM clusters.
Custom RAG Pipeline for Internal LLM Tooling
Developed a Python application to export documents from wikis, knowledge bases, and GitLab, chunk and vectorize them into ChromaDB, and power internal LLMs that help staff draft replies and troubleshoot issues.
Centralized IP Threat Intelligence System
Built Perl modules querying multiple public threat intelligence APIs, with a centralized data store and Redis caching to cut down on redundant external lookups.
Zendesk Webhook API
Developed an HMAC-verified Perl Plack REST API to auto-complete ticket details from a username or account number, saving support staff significant manual lookup time.
Nginx & Apache Rate Limiting
Integrated connection and request rate limiting into a legacy build system, with a reporting pipeline to check false positives and tune thresholds.
KPI & Business Metrics Pipeline
Automated the collection of core business metrics across billing and account systems into a central database, replacing recurring manual reporting.
CloudLinux Integration
Integrated CloudLinux into a legacy build system and Puppet across a fleet of shared servers, with custom monitoring integrations and an Ansible playbook for fleet-wide deployment.
Automated SSL Renewal Notices
Replaced a highly manual certificate-expiration notification process with automated tooling, saving substantial support staff time.
Technical Toolbox
Languages
Infra & DevOps
Data & Caching
Security & Networking
Tools
Contributions to the Community
Term::ReadLine::Repl
Published CPAN REPL module, used in production cluster-management tooling.
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