Archana Balasundaram, Developer in Chennai, India
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Archana Balasundaram

Verified Expert  in Engineering

DevOps Engineer and Application Developer

Location
Chennai, India
Toptal Member Since
May 14, 2021

Archana is a senior DevOps engineer with six years of experience, including application development, where she worked with various tech stacks. She has solid hands-on experience setting up CI/CD pipelines, Docker, Kubernetes, Azure, Heroku, AWS, infrastructure as code, and Terraform. As a quick learner, she is passionate about mastering new technologies. Archana is also a great team member, reliable in achieving on-time deliverables.

Portfolio

MANSA LATHAM LLC
Amazon Web Services (AWS), DevOps, Scripting, CI/CD Pipelines, GitHub, New Relic
Yara International - DNU - Agoro
Kubernetes, Terraform, Amazon Web Services (AWS), AWS DevOps, CircleCI...
Ally Technologies
Heroku, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure, CircleCI, Continuous Deployment...

Experience

Availability

Part-time

Preferred Environment

Amazon Web Services (AWS), Heroku, Azure, Terraform, Ansible, Ruby on Rails 5, PostgreSQL, Kubernetes, Ruby, Docker

The most amazing...

...project I've worked on is migrating a SaaS application containing multiple microservices and datastores from Heroku to AWS and setting up a new CI/CD pipeline.

Work Experience

Senior DevOps Engineer

2022 - 2023
MANSA LATHAM LLC
  • Built the infrastructure comprising Docker containers running in EC2 instance with Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) upfront to handle the traffic. Automated the infrastructure provisioning with Terraform.
  • Constructed the CI/CD pipeline with GitHub Actions with stages to build Docker images and deploy them to EC2 servers. Enabled slack notifications about the status of the pipeline workflow.
  • Set up log collection using Journalctl. Enabled monitoring for the ecosystem using New Relic.
Technologies: Amazon Web Services (AWS), DevOps, Scripting, CI/CD Pipelines, GitHub, New Relic

DevOps Engineer

2021 - 2022
Yara International - DNU - Agoro
  • Managed Kubernetes clusters using Terraform across multiple AWS accounts.
  • Focused mainly on setting up monitoring and logging using the ELK stack.
  • Improved code quality by integrating SonarQube as part of the deployment pipeline.
Technologies: Kubernetes, Terraform, Amazon Web Services (AWS), AWS DevOps, CircleCI, CI/CD Pipelines, DevOps, Jira, GitHub, JavaScript, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), Networking, Cloud Architecture

Senior DevOps Engineer

2020 - 2021
Ally Technologies
  • Streamlined continuous deployment by establishing best practices for the development cycle and a CI/CD pipeline using CircleCI to run automation test suites, approve the release process, and deploy around seven microservices.
  • Managed a Kubernetes cluster AKS in Azure, which hosted applications for multiple development environments. Also managed resources, such as PostgreSQL, Redis, and Azure Key Vault, and set up Azure DevOps pipelines to automate the deployment to AKS.
  • Handled many maintenance activities for databases in the production environment, keeping downtime as low as possible. Enabled autoscaling of infrastructure elements based on traffic and the number of background jobs in the queue.
  • Built dashboards in NewRelic, Datadog, and SolarWinds, using the metrics from applications and infrastructure components. Configured alerts in PagerDuty that connected incidents from various sources and helped reduce significant downtimes.
  • Provisioned and managed a suite of applications in Heroku common and private spaces. Migrated applications from Heroku common space to private space. Configured various databases and other add-ons in the Heroku platform.
Technologies: Heroku, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure, CircleCI, Continuous Deployment, CI/CD Pipelines, Continuous Integration (CI), Ruby on Rails 3, SSL Certificates, SSL Configurations, Transport Layer Security (TLS), DevOps, Jira, GitHub, JavaScript, Cloud Security, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), Cloud Migration, Networking, Cloud Architecture

Senior DevOps Engineer

2019 - 2020
Francium Tech
  • Provisioned and managed the required infrastructure for the project, using Terraform for IaC. Used Sensu for monitoring the infrastructure components.
  • Migrated applications and data stores from Heroku to AWS in multiple phases, ensuring a seamless transition and zero data loss with minimal downtime for the entire system.
  • Automated code deployment using AWS CodePipeline, which takes care of building artifacts, running test suites, and deployment to AWS Elastic Beanstalk.
Technologies: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Vue, Ruby on Rails 5, Ansible, Terraform, Packer, Ruby on Rails (RoR), PostgreSQL, CircleCI, CI/CD Pipelines, SSL Certificates, SSL Configurations, Transport Layer Security (TLS), Go, DevOps, Jira, GitHub, JavaScript, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), Cloud Architecture

Application Developer

2016 - 2019
ThoughtWorks
  • Containerized the applications written in languages such as Ruby on Rails, Java, and JavaScript, using Docker for local development and as containers for the production environment.
  • Worked in a multi-cloud architecture, leveraging services from AWS and GCP, where self-managed Kubernetes clusters were set up using Kubernetes Operations (kOps). Handled deployments using Helm, the package manager for Kubernetes resources.
  • Automated configuration management tasks using Ansible, helping the team significantly reduce manual efforts. Enabled automated deployment with the Octopus deployment tool.
  • Developed many features for a PaaS application by working with coding languages, including Python, Java, and Vue. Worked with many Python frameworks, such as Flask and Django.
Technologies: Kubernetes, Helm, Docker, Ansible, Terraform, Python, PostgreSQL, CircleCI, CI/CD Pipelines, Jira, JavaScript, TypeScript, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), Cloud Architecture, Jenkins

OKR Platform

An OKR platform to track your goals and progress at any scale. I was part of the DevOps team and handled end-to-end operations required to bring the platform live.

Right from setting up the version control system, deploying the Ruby on Rails application in Heroku, and configuring the PostgreSQL database, I took care of the entire architecture.

Firstly, I automated the deployment workflow with CircleCI to run static code analysis, integration tests, deployment to the Heroku environment, and database migrations. I also took ownership of migrating the application from Heroku to Azure with minimal downtime and zero data loss. Furthermore, I enabled deployments to AKS in Azure using Azure DevOps pipelines shipping Docker containers to a Kubernetes cluster. I established an extensive monitoring and alerting system that tracks metrics from the infrastructure to APM, using tools like NewRelic and pganalyze. Alerts helped the team react proactively to prevent issues, reducing system downtime.

Data Orchestration Platform

A PaaS application for data orchestration, built with a multi-cloud architecture that enables data loading, cleansing, and visualization. I owned the complete DevOps responsibilities for this project.

I automated the infrastructure setup for two different cloud providers, AWS and GCP, using Terraform. I also streamlined the CI/CD pipeline setup in GitLab for automated deployments to the Kubernetes clusters present in the cloud providers. I automated deployment, enabling the team to deliver features frequently while ensuring quality by integrating test suite automation as part of the pipeline. Finally, I scaled the system based on the traffic and ensured autoscaling, enabling the system to scale seamlessly when we had a surge in the number of platform users to around 3x.

Agronomy Project

A major corporation focused on crop nutrition for the future. A leading force in the development of sustainable agriculture and digital tools to contribute to solving global agricultural challenges.

I was part of their DevOps team, taking care of the Kubernetes clusters of various environments. Focused mainly on their logging architecture, set up Elasticsearch for log collection and anomaly detections, and configured alert systems.
2012 - 2016

Bachelor of Engineering Degree in Computer Science

SSN College of Engineering, Anna University - Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India

NOVEMBER 2021 - NOVEMBER 2024

Certified Kubernetes Administrator

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation

Tools

AWS IAM, Jira, GitHub, Terraform, Ansible, IntelliJ IDEA, ELK (Elastic Stack), Amazon EKS, SolarWinds, AWS CloudFormation, AWS Key Management Service (KMS), HashiCorp, Docker Swarm, GitLab, GitLab CI/CD, AWS ELB, CircleCI, Packer, Helm, Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Vim Text Editor, Grafana, Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), AWS AppSync, Jenkins

Paradigms

Continuous Deployment, Continuous Integration (CI), DevOps, Continuous Delivery (CD), Agile Software Development, Test-driven Development (TDD), Test-driven Deployment, Azure DevOps

Platforms

Heroku, Kubernetes, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure, Docker, Visual Studio Code (VS Code), New Relic, Amazon EC2, AWS Lambda, Linux, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Sensu

Storage

Amazon S3 (AWS S3), PostgreSQL, Redis, MySQL, Databases, MongoDB, Elasticsearch, Datadog

Other

CI/CD Pipelines, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), Scripting, DevOps Engineer, Documentation, Cloud Architecture, Algorithms, Data Structures, Octopus Deploy, Amazon RDS, SSL Certificates, SSL Configurations, Transport Layer Security (TLS), AWS Cloud Architecture, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), Cloud Migration, Networking, Operating Systems, Monitoring, Prometheus, Kubernetes Operations (kOps), SOC 2, AWS DevOps, Cloud Security

Languages

Python, Bash, Snowflake, JavaScript, Ruby, Java, C++, Python 3, Go, TypeScript

Frameworks

Ruby on Rails 5, Ruby on Rails (RoR), Ruby on Rails 3

Libraries/APIs

Vue, React, Node.js

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