Chris Kuech, Developer in Seattle, WA, United States
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Chris Kuech

Verified Expert  in Engineering

Software Developer

Seattle, WA, United States

Toptal member since May 20, 2021

Expertise
C#DevOpsAzureTypeScriptDockerNode.jsGitHubIISLinuxSQLWindows DevelopmentKubernetes
Bio

Chris has spent his entire career building enterprise-scale DevOps platforms at Microsoft, first auditing and replacing business-critical black-box applications with cloud-native solutions, then managing microservice security and identity for one of Microsoft's internal microservice platforms. He has an intimate understanding of how DevOps culture, processes, technologies, and design patterns can dramatically improve service maintainability across a dynamic compliance landscape.

Portfolio

Microsoft
Azure, Kubernetes, C#, Windows PowerShell, Linux, Azure Active Directory...
Microsoft
Azure, SQL, C#, IIS, Windows, Windows PowerShell, Azure Active Directory...

Experience

  • C# - 6 years
  • Windows PowerShell - 6 years
  • Azure - 6 years
  • DevOps - 6 years
  • TypeScript - 5 years
  • Azure Active Directory - 4 years
  • Docker - 4 years
  • ASP.NET Core MVC - 4 years

Availability

Part-time

Preferred Environment

Azure, Windows PowerShell, C#, TypeScript, Docker, Node.js

The most amazing...

...thing I've done is replacing Microsoft's 90,000-line DevOps codebase with a few thousand lines of PowerShell, Azure Resource Manager, and Docker code.

Work Experience

Software Engineer

2018 - PRESENT
Microsoft
  • Built an Azure, Kubernetes, and ASP.NET Core microservice platform to enable modern Agile development of product features alongside a legacy non-Agile product while handling microservice security and operations across multiple compliance zones.
  • Designed and built the identity and access management microservice for our microservice platform and the C#-based framework for automatic service discovery, token acquisition, and role-based access control in our services from untrusted clients.
  • Designed and built the integration between React apps and our microservice platform, enabling modern Agile development of React apps embedded within a legacy non-Agile application and communication between the legacy client and React client.
  • Collaborated with the teams using our microservice platform to better understand their actual usage patterns versus our intended usage patterns. Modified our framework and formulated processes to maximize the platform-user consistency and synergy.
  • Joined a new team temporarily, as their development of a critical feature had stagnated. I ended up reimplementing the whole C# layer while broadening the scope of features covered in the initial release and implementing DevOps features like CI/CD.
Technologies: Azure, Kubernetes, C#, Windows PowerShell, Linux, Azure Active Directory, DevOps, ASP.NET Core MVC

Site Reliability Engineer

2015 - 2018
Microsoft
  • Owned a collection of legacy black-box ETL data pipelines used across Microsoft's marketing and eCommerce systems. Managed a small team of vendors to keep the system operational while I audited and overhauled the system with cloud-based solutions.
  • Overhauled the L7 load balancer (URL rewrite system) on Microsoft's website with a cloud-based solution to enable improved testing and safer rollout and separating routing data from routing logic while also enabling continued auditing and cleanup.
  • Wrote a playbook and scripts for easily migrating various small services (including time.windows.com) to cloud-native and DevOps solutions while complying with our organization's specific operational and compliance requirements.
  • Overhauled the deployment system for Microsoft's marketing and eCommerce rendering services.
  • Audited the 90,000-line DevOps codebase and applied declarative programming methodology, reducing the system to 3,000 lines while enabling increased resiliency.
Technologies: Azure, SQL, C#, IIS, Windows, Windows PowerShell, Azure Active Directory, DevOps, ASP.NET Core MVC

Requirements Project

https://github.com/microsoft/requirements
Requirements is a PowerShell Gallery module for declaratively describing a system as a set of "requirements," then idempotently setting each requirement to its desired state.

This declarative programming paradigm greatly improves code safety, security, simplicity, and maintainability. DevOps tools such as Azure Resource Manager, Kubernetes, and Docker allow modeling much of your DevOps system declaratively, but these tools are always glued together with non-declarative scripts. Requirements enable modeling even your PowerShell code declaratively, so you can ensure your entire DevOps system has the safety of declarative programming.

Libraries/APIs

Node.js

Tools

GitHub

Languages

C#, TypeScript, SQL

Frameworks

Windows PowerShell, ASP.NET Core MVC

Paradigms

DevOps

Platforms

Azure, Docker, Windows, Kubernetes, Linux

Storage

Azure Active Directory

Other

IIS

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