Archana Balasundaram
Verified Expert in Engineering
DevOps Engineer and Application Developer
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
Experience
Availability
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
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.
DevOps Engineer
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.
Senior DevOps Engineer
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.
Senior DevOps Engineer
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.
Application Developer
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.
Experience
OKR Platform
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
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
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.
Education
Bachelor of Engineering Degree in Computer Science
SSN College of Engineering, Anna University - Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India
Certifications
Certified Kubernetes Administrator
The Cloud Native Computing Foundation
Skills
Libraries/APIs
Vue, React, Node.js
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 (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
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
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
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