Vishal Patel
Verified Expert in Engineering
DevOps Engineer and Software Developer
Ottawa, ON, Canada
Toptal member since May 6, 2022
Vishal is a DevOps and Kubernetes architect with over four years of experience designing, implementing, and managing production-ready Kubernetes infrastructure and its cloud-native tools in hybrid environments. He has worked on setting up infrastructure as code and CI/CD process baselines and helped in organization-wide adaptation.
Portfolio
Experience
- DevOps - 7 years
- Kubernetes - 6 years
- Docker - 6 years
- Continuous Delivery (CD) - 5 years
- Argo CD - 4 years
- Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) - 4 years
- Azure - 4 years
- Terraform - 4 years
Work Experience
Senior Consultant/Lead | DevOps Engineer | SRE | Kubernetes Cloud Architect
Self-employed
- Led managed cloud and on-prem Kubernetes operations; acted as Kubernetes architect/trainer, enabling Linux admins for Kubernetes/OpenShift, and managing full container lifecycle.
- Automated gov-sector on-prem Kubernetes using Terraform/Crossplane and GitLab; architected AKS with IaC aligned to enterprise landing-zone standards.
- Introduced DevOps culture via local Docker/Kubernetes/Kind setups. Used Kaniko/Skaffold to streamline builds, improve developer velocity, and enable frequent releases.
- Designed landing zones across GCP/Azure for single/multi-tenant setups, ensuring compliance with NIST 800-53 and enterprise security frameworks.
- Delivered Protected-B cloud landing zones; built Terraform modules for networking/security/infra. Led automation, scaling, metrics, alerting, and backup practices.
- Led cross-cloud workload migrations with automated checklists. Helped teams containerize and modernize legacy applications for cloud portability.
- Built/operated ArgoCD GitOps across multi-cluster setups. Optimized sync, auto-rollback, and ApplicationSets for reliable pull-based deployments.
- Implemented CI/CD with GitHub Actions and Tekton. Added deployment gates, approvals, progressive delivery, and secure workflows using Argo Rollouts.
- Streamlined multi-env promotions via Kargo, enabling clear release flows and a unified dashboard for GitOps visibility and environment progression.
- Designed/operated multi-node blockchain clusters (EVM/Tendermint). Tuned operating system/database/network, implemented HSM-backed key custody, chain-safe upgrades, and deep gossip-layer monitoring.
Senior Consultant
Microsoft Professional Service (via a Consulting Company)
- Recommended best practices for cloud service integration multi-region deployments (Terraform, Azure ARM, Bicep).
- Evaluated client requirements for a container-based architecture and architecture-designed landing zones using Azure Kubernetes Service and Azure Red Hat OpenShift solutions. Also helped with cloud migration from AWS to Azure or GCP to Azure when necessary.
- Delivered security awareness sessions for cloud services and cloud-native tools. Provided a plan of action to implement.
- Showcased how to containerize legacy applications with modern frameworks and microservices benefits. Promoted blue-green/canary deployments.
- Automated Kubernetes upgrades and enhanced observability through logging and monitoring data.
- Partnered with stakeholders to build effective teams based on skill sets and business needs. Worked with the client for team formation and aligned day two operations based on organization process and procedure.
- Architected infrastructure automation with Crossplane and Azure Service Operator, allowing Kubernetes-native management of Azure resources. Created reusable modules to simplify provisioning and scaling.
Google Cloud Platform Engineer
Priceline - GCP
- Wrote Python script to generate a multi-cluster manifest of Cloudability and New Relic and encrypted secrets using sops.
- Investigated and debugged pod and node scaling, pod disruption, and budget-related issues to minimize business impact from unavailable applications when performing lifecycle management of GKE or related cloud-native tools.
- Enabled webhook admission controller to forcefully apply and mutate limits to manifest new workloads, including renewing certificate pairs. Suggested patterns to automate this process by using a cert-manager.
Experience
Kubernetes Infrastructure on Premises | Cloud Agnostic Bare-metal
It can also be deployed in the air gap zone when the container images are imported to the registry successfully.
Education
Master’s Degree in Electrical and Computer
Carleton University - Ottawa, Canada
Certifications
Certified Kubernetes Security Specialist
The Linux Foundation
AZ-303: Microsoft Azure Architect Technologies
Microsoft
Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect Expert
Microsoft
Aviatrix Certified Engineer Multicloud Network Associate
Aviatrix
Certified Kubernetes Application Developer
The Linux Foundations
Certified Kubernetes Administrator
The Linux Foundations
Skills
Libraries/APIs
Azure API Management, Terragrunt
Tools
Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Helm, Grafana, Apache, Kustomize, Terraform, Git, Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR), Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), GitLab CI/CD, Jenkins, Vagrant, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), GitLab, GitHub, Jira, HashiCorp, Kubernetes HorizontalPodAutoscaler (HPA), Splunk, Ansible, Istio, ELK (Elastic Stack), Azure Key Vault, Docker Compose, Azure Network Security Groups, Confluence, Artifactory, Google Compute Engine (GCE), Kubernetes Operators, Shell, Amazon EKS, AWS IAM, Sentinel, SonarQube, Systemd, VPN, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), AWS CloudFormation, Kibana, CircleCI, Kong, Apache Airflow, VMware
Paradigms
DevOps, Azure DevOps, Continuous Integration (CI), Continuous Delivery (CD), Management, Microservices, Microservices Architecture, DevSecOps, Continuous Development (CD), DDoS
Platforms
Kubernetes, Docker, Amazon Web Services (AWS), DigitalOcean, Ubuntu, OpenShift, Linux, Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Rancher, New Relic, Amazon EC2, OpenStack, Apache Kafka, Azure PaaS, Azure AI Studio, MacOS
Languages
Python, Bash, YAML, Markdown, Go, AppleScript
Frameworks
Flux, Windows PowerShell, Crossplane, OAuth 2
Storage
Azure Blobs, Amazon S3 (AWS S3), Datadog, Elasticsearch
Other
Task Analysis, High-availability Systems, DevOps Engineer, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), Solution Architecture, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), Containers, Infrastructure, CI/CD Pipelines, Cloud, Cloud Computing, Microsoft Azure, Scripting, Cloud Infrastructure, Pipelines, Technical Hiring, Source Code Review, Interviewing, Security, APIs, Back-end, Load Balancers, Azure Resource Manager (ARM), API Management, Cloudflare, Containerization, Amazon API Gateway, Site Reliability, GitOps, Cloud Security, IT Support, Prometheus, GitHub Actions, Service Meshes, DNS Debugging, Shell Scripting, Azure Virtual Networks, Cost Reduction & Optimization (Cost-down), ECS, Scalability, Orchestration, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Argo CD, Flux CD, ARM, GPU Computing, Nvidia DGX, Kubernetes Controllers, Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), Virtualization, Kubernetes Operations (kOps), Linux Administration, Vulnerability Management, Vulnerability Identification, AWS DevOps, Architecture, Hypervisors, Networking, Team Leadership, Linux Server Administration, High Availability Disaster Recovery (HADR), Hardware Security Modules (HSMs), HSM, Aviatrix, Automation Scripting, Automated Deployment Scripts, System Administration, Debugging
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