
Mikko Kokkonen
Verified Expert in Engineering
Cloud Engineer and Developer
Hamburg, Germany
Toptal member since April 13, 2022
Mikko is an experienced DevOps engineer and developer with almost two decades of professional experience in programming and systems administration. He focuses on implementing modern production environments based on the cloud while utilizing the latest best practices. Mikko always ensures that companies have the best and most reliable infrastructure for production.
Portfolio
Experience
- Linux - 20 years
- DevOps - 20 years
- Ruby - 12 years
- PostgreSQL - 10 years
- Terraform - 9 years
- Kubernetes - 9 years
- Ruby on Rails (RoR) - 8 years
- GitHub Actions - 3 years
Availability
Preferred Environment
DevOps, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Ruby, Terragrunt, Terraform, Containerization, GitHub, Helm, Linux System Administration, AWS Cloud Computing Services
The most amazing...
...thing I've designed and implemented was a full web experience with automated CI/CD pipelines, including review environments for pull request reviews.
Work Experience
DevSecOps Engineer
Self-employed
- Reduced AWS costs by 20% by migrating workloads from a static ECS environment to an auto-scaling Kubernetes cluster.
- Migrated on-premises servers and workloads successfully to AWS cloud, reducing management overhead and cost by 30%.
- Enhanced developer experience by fostering seamless collaboration between DevOps and development teams.
- Built an automated deployment pipeline utilizing Argo CD and Crossplane to support independent development teams in delivering required infrastructure and application changes automatically.
- Evaluated the state of the infrastructure and built a roadmap for improvements to a more robust and performant infrastructure.
- Established a platform team to take control of the platform and SRE support for the team.
Senior Software Engineer
1KOMMA5˚ GmbH
- Evaluated the existing codebase and planned improvements for architecture and code quality to ensure the platform's scalability.
- Introduced an event-based system design to a legacy monolithic application to support rapid scaling and expansion to multiple markets.
- Improved development process by ensuring best practices of the Agile methodology are followed.
- Implemented a continuous deployment pipeline for three environments (development, staging, and production).
Senior Site Reliability DevOps Engineer
Leap Technologies Inc.
- Reduced the overall AWS bill by 20% with cost management and tracking. Utilized Spot instances, implemented observability to right-size workloads and per-customer cost tracking.
- Implemented and ensured the company's SOC 2 controls were in place and followed. Successfully ensured the audit without any exceptions.
- Planned and executed the successful migration of the legacy environment from AWS ECS to Kubernetes (EKS).
Engineering Manager
Kwara GmbH
- Set up a new engineering hiring process to ensure the fast and simple hiring of the best candidates.
- Established regular one-on-ones and catchups with the team to ensure they were satisfied and that any issues affecting the team were quickly resolved.
- Implemented the improved production environment using Kubernetes and AWS services.
CPO | Lead Developer
ItsMyCargo
- Defined and executed product management framework and best practices such as Agile methodology, implemented Jira as a tracking tool, and followed up on important metrics in the development team.
- Implemented a modern production infrastructure by defining everything as Terraform IaaC and implementing a Kubernetes-based environment.
- Mentored and guided engineers on important design decisions and best practices within the codebase.
- Implemented the best practices with strict code reviews and test-driven development within the development team, ensuring well-tested code and successfully reducing the number of customer-facing bugs.
- Introduced Scrum methodology to the development team and improved the team's predictability of deliveries within the development process.
Software Developer
Appear Here
- Implemented the component-based rails applications (CBRA) approach to solve technical debt within the legacy codebase, allowing cleaner and better-organized code to be proceeds easier.
- Defined the hiring process and helped scale the engineering team from five engineers to fifteen by screening candidates and conducting technical interviews.
- Implemented a better and faster CI/CD pipeline using Jenkins and deployments on AWS Fargate.
- Mentored and coached developers to help them with their daily coding challenges and ensured and shared knowledge on improving the codebase and using the best approaches and solutions.
Software Developer
Stratajet
- Implemented new infrastructure based on AWS Auto Scaling groups, allowing atomic deployments with automatic healing in case of bad deployments and automated scaling.
- Mentored and coached other developers on the best code practices and solutions to daily challenges.
- Implemented the CI/CD pipeline using AWS CloudFormation for infrastructure automation and Jenkins with custom pipeline functions for running tests and deployments.
Founder
Owl Forestry
- Gathered business requirements and provided production support to deliver a digital signage solution for the client.
- Implemented the digital magazine publishing platform that included a Ruby on Rails-based management portal for publishers and an iOS application for iPad and iPhone to enable consumers to read published magazines.
- Reimplemented an extensive ebook for a large Finnish publisher for the iOS platform; the ebook was initially developed for the Symbian platform that needed to be updated for iOS.
Senior Software Developer
Wimdu
- Migrated application from the managed servers to full AWS cloud infrastructure, allowing the application to auto-scale and auto-heal utilizing autoscaling groups.
- Improved the developer productivity by implementing better Jenkins pipelines, decreasing build times, and allowing better notifications and error messages when tests failed.
- Implemented the first production deployment pipeline for microservices using Jenkins pipelines and Puppet-managed servers for deploying Docker-based containers.
IT Manager
Asian Room Service Sdn Bdh
- Transitioned the team to scrum to ensure more predictable deliveries.
- Implemented the component-based rails application (CBRA) to allow easier rewrite and clean legacy Rails applications utilizing engines and isolation of the new code.
- Mentored and managed the off-shore and in-house team to ensure all developers were performant and had all resources they needed.
Experience
Migration to Kubernetes
I implemented a proper CI/CD pipeline where each successful main branch build was deployed to the Kubernetes cluster.
Legacy Platform Migration
Digital Signage
Skills
Libraries/APIs
Terragrunt, REST APIs
Tools
Terraform, Amazon EKS, Git, GitHub, Jenkins, Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), AWS IAM, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Helm, NGINX, VPN, Observability Tools, Amazon CloudWatch, Packer, AWS CodeBuild, Amazon Simple Email Service (SES), Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS), AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK), AWS Deployment, GitLab CI/CD, Grafana, ELK (Elastic Stack)
Languages
Ruby, Bash, SQL, Python
Frameworks
Ruby on Rails (RoR), Crossplane
Paradigms
DevOps, DevSecOps
Platforms
Kubernetes, Linux, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Docker, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Amazon EC2, AWS Cloud Computing Services, DigitalOcean, AWS Lambda, Vercel
Storage
Amazon S3 (AWS S3), MySQL, Elasticsearch, NoSQL, PostgreSQL, PostGIS, Google Cloud, Redshift, Datadog
Other
CI/CD Pipelines, GitHub Actions, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), Infrastructure, Scripting, DevOps Engineer, AWS DevOps, ECS, Scalable Web Services, Incident Management, Linux System Administration, Reliability Engineering, GitOps, Cloud Architecture, Terraform Cloud, Security, Policy as code (PaC), Argo CD, Architecture, Team Leadership, Product Management, Engineering Management, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), Amazon RDS, System Administration, Pulumi, Application Monitoring, AWS Control Tower
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