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Philipp Strube
Verified Expert in Engineering
Terraform Developer
Berlin, Germany
Toptal member since December 10, 2020
Bio
Philipp is a platform engineering specialist with deep expertise in cloud architecture, Terraform, and Kubernetes. As the maintainer of Kubestack, the open-source platform engineering framework for AKS, EKS, and GKE, he is at the forefront of cloud-native infrastructure. His extensive background includes founding the public PaaS provider cloudControl, IaaS at Exoscale, and enterprise Kubernetes at CoreOS. Most recently, Philipp led the multi-cloud Kubernetes platform team at Woven by Toyota.
Portfolio
Woven by Toyota
Amazon EKS, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Terraform, GitHub, Kubestack...
Woven by Toyota
Kubernetes, Continuous Delivery (CD), Continuous Integration (CI)...
Kubestack
GitHub, GitLab CI/CD, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)...
Experience
- Platform Engineering - 10 years
- Terraform - 10 years
- Kubernetes - 8 years
- Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) - 5 years
- Amazon EKS - 5 years
- Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) - 5 years
- Go - 5 years
- Kubernetes Operators - 5 years
Work Experience
Staff Kubernetes Platform Engineer
2024 - 2026
Woven by Toyota
- Designed and led the implementation of a multi-cloud Kubernetes platform using Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).
- Implemented self-service namespace and managed service provisioning for application teams.
- Established charge-back for Kubernetes workloads and managed services to application teams.
- Developed geo IP ingress to the closest cluster with in-mesh routing to the cluster hosting the workload.
Technologies: Amazon EKS, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Terraform, GitHub, Kubestack, Kubernetes, Kubernetes Operators, Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Platform Engineering
DevOps Engineer (via Toptal)
2021 - 2024
Woven by Toyota
- Wrote initial design document to define requirements and propose strategy across IT and security stakeholders.
- Led technology and architecture decisions for the newly formed team.
- Trained team members and application teams using the platform.
Technologies: Kubernetes, Continuous Delivery (CD), Continuous Integration (CI), Platform Engineering
Founder
2017 - 2024
Kubestack
- Started and maintained Kubestack, the open-source Terraform framework for platform engineering teams, supporting AKS, EKS, and GKE managed Kubernetes.
- Provided documentation, tutorials, and content marketing, and built a community around the open-source framework.
- Helped companies from startups to enterprises build Kubernetes platforms using the Kubestack framework.
Technologies: GitHub, GitLab CI/CD, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Amazon EKS, Kubernetes, Terraform, Platform Engineering
Kubernetes Elite DevOps Engineer - AWS Stack (via Toptal)
2021 - 2021
The PepsiCo Foundation, Inc. - Food for Good
- Designed and implemented a dedicated AWS-based Kubernetes platform based on Kubestack.
- Migrated running application from legacy infrastructure to new Kubernetes platform.
- Trained the application engineers on continuous deployment for the platform and the application.
Technologies: Kubernetes, CI/CD Pipelines, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Terraform
Director of Technology
2018 - 2020
Container Solutions
- Started Container Solution's SRE practice, hired the first team, and led the groundwork of how to provide SRE as a service to clients.
- Helped companies from finance to manufacturing adopt cloud-native best practices, including organizational changes and learning, and adopting new processes and technologies.
- Led teams on software development and infrastructure automation projects for international clients.
- Started the company's Berlin branch and recruited and hired employees for the new office.
Technologies: Amazon EKS, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Kubernetes, Terraform, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), Platform Engineering
General Manager for EMEA
2017 - 2018
CoreOS
- Led the engineering management and product management teams to integrate Prometheus as the monitoring solution into CoreOS' enterprise Kubernetes distribution, Tectonic.
- Prototyped experimental integrations for Tectonic, including Google Cloud Platform, Packet, and VMware.
- Helped out as an early European sales engineering resource for partners and potential customers.
Technologies: CoreOS, Tectonic, Terraform, Prometheus, Kubernetes
Managing Director for Germany
2016 - 2017
Exoscale
- Introduced sign-up funnel analytics and experiments to iteratively increase conversion rates.
- Released an open-source Ansible playbook for multi-master Kubernetes on Exoscale's IaaS solution.
- Contributed to product and content marketing to differentiate from other developer-focused cloud offerings.
Technologies: Ansible, Python, Terraform, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
Founder | CEO
2009 - 2016
cloudControl
- Developed the PaaS technology and founded one of the world's first public PaaS providers, running production workloads in containers as early as 2011.
- Conducted 24/7 operations and provided customer support for thousands of virtual machines across multiple cloud providers and regions.
- Innovated in the early days of cloud and containers, being recognized in the Gartner Magic Quadrant report for PaaS twice.
Technologies: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), Boto, Django, OpenStack, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Python
Experience
Kubestack | Terraform GitOps Framework
https://www.kubestack.com/Kubestack provides everything teams need to build reliable automation for AKS, EKS, and GKE Kubernetes clusters in one free and open-source framework. It integrates Terraform providers and resources into a reliable inheritance-based multi-environment automation with a GitOps workflow for teams.
Terraform Provider Kustomization
https://github.com/kbst/terraform-provider-kustomizationThis provider extends Terraform to support Kubernetes manifests managed via Kustomize and integrates each resource into Terraform's plan-apply lifecycle.
It can be used both as a replacement for Kubectl in a standalone CI/CD pipeline and to integrate Kubernetes resources into existing Terraform configurations.
It can be used both as a replacement for Kubectl in a standalone CI/CD pipeline and to integrate Kubernetes resources into existing Terraform configurations.
Skills
Tools
Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Amazon EKS, Terraform, GitHub, GitLab, Kubernetes Operators, GitLab CI/CD, Ansible, Boto
Paradigms
Automation, DevOps, Continuous Delivery (CD), Continuous Integration (CI)
Platforms
Kubernetes, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Kubestack, CoreOS, OpenStack, Application Platform
Languages
Python, Go
Frameworks
Django
Other
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), CI/CD Pipelines, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), Platform Engineering, Deployment, Kubebuilder, Prometheus, Tectonic, Platform as a Service (PaaS)
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