Qasim is available for hire
Hire QasimQasim Mehmood
Verified Expert in Engineering
Software Developer
Lahore, Punjab, Pakistan
Toptal member since April 10, 2021
Bio
Qasim has proven experience setting up resilient infrastructure by leveraging different cloud platforms; utilizing automation, logging, and monitoring tools; and setting up CI/CD pipelines. He is also a frequent contributor to various AWS first-party repos. Qasim has joined Toptal to engage in challenging work with clients across the world and learn from the top talented people.
Portfolio
Spin (Ford Mobility)
Kubernetes, Terraform, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Infrastructure as Code (IaC)...
EMPG
Kubernetes, Terraform, Amazon EKS, Amazon EC2, AWS Fargate, Amazon RDS...
Jeeny (EasyTaxi MiddleEast)
Amazon Web Services (AWS), Puppet, Kubernetes, MongoDB, ActiveMQ, Apache Kafka...
Experience
- Linux - 7 years
- Bash - 7 years
- ELK (Elastic Stack) - 6 years
- Kubernetes - 5 years
- Amazon Web Services (AWS) - 5 years
- Terraform - 4 years
- Docker - 4 years
- Jenkins - 4 years
Availability
Part-time
Preferred Environment
Kubernetes, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Linux, ELK (Elastic Stack), Ansible, Terraform
The most amazing...
...project I have worked on is the seamless migration of a complex microservices-based infrastructure from EC2 instances managed by puppet to Kubernetes (EKS).
Work Experience
Senior DevOps Engineer
2021 - 2021
Spin (Ford Mobility)
- Enabled autoscaling by setting up the cluster autoscaler, switching to AWS Load Balancer Controller, and moving assets to CDN, reducing compute costs by 70%.
- Deployed Istio service mesh to encrypt internal traffic containing sensitive data and provided support for enhanced telemetry.
- Researched and deployed various new tools to aid new product features and architecture refactoring, including Teleport, Kyverno, Amazon API Gateway, Apigee, Confluent in Kafka, and Aiven for Apache Kafka.
- Debugged and fixed long-running network issues on IoT devices by setting up a new environment with thousands of emulators and collecting traces and metrics in Datadog.
- Built an authentication mechanism for a back-end API using Ingress-Nginx.
Technologies: Kubernetes, Terraform, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Infrastructure as Code (IaC), CI/CD Pipelines, Continuous Integration (CI), Amazon Route 53, Amazon RDS
Principal Software Engineer
2020 - 2021
EMPG
- Built a Kubernetes-based infrastructure platform to allow developers to rapidly prototype new projects and seamlessly promote them to production.
- Led the re-architecture of legacy-EC2-based applications for migration to a modern Kubernetes and AWS Lambda-based environment, improving reliability by ten times.
- Improved the observability of the applications by setting up APM, central logging, and metrics collection. Improved the database performance by cleaning up legacy tables and restructuring audit logs.
- Developed and deployed a Lambda-based image-processing solution on multiple projects for real-time image processing with nearly infinite capacity.
Technologies: Kubernetes, Terraform, Amazon EKS, Amazon EC2, AWS Fargate, Amazon RDS, AWS Lambda, Serverless, AWS CloudFormation, AWS ALB, Amazon CloudFront CDN, Cloudflare, Python, Docker, Jenkins, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), CI/CD Pipelines, Networking, Continuous Integration (CI), Amazon Route 53, GitHub Actions
Senior DevOps Engineer
2019 - 2020
Jeeny (EasyTaxi MiddleEast)
- Transitioned the infrastructure from being manually provisioned to Kubernetes with infrastructure-as-code, using CloudFormation.
- Automated unit tests, release builds, deployments, rollbacks, and developer workflows by building CI/CD pipelines.
- Analyzed and improved the stack to identify and eliminate performance bottlenecks and points of failure.
- Oversaw the operational management of an AWS environment, delivering a complex microservices-based stack by setting up various IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS environments and the associated automation tooling.
Technologies: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Puppet, Kubernetes, MongoDB, ActiveMQ, Apache Kafka, ELK (Elastic Stack), Linux, Amazon Linux, Jenkins, Helm, AWS Lambda, Microservices, AWS CloudFormation, Docker, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), DevOps, CI/CD Pipelines, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), Networking, Continuous Integration (CI), Amazon Route 53, Amazon RDS
Systems Engineer
2017 - 2020
PakWheels
- Built a modern cloud infrastructure to host essential services for 30 million users, ensuring highly available and resilient applications.
- Set up an AWS environment from scratch with fully automated CI/CD pipelines, immutable infrastructure, end-to-end redundancy, and in-depth analytics to host a high-traffic website.
- Led the migration from bare metal servers to AWS public cloud and redesigned the system architecture for a modern platform.
- Built a solution around Elastic Stack for in-depth monitoring, logging, and alerting the entire infrastructure.
- Optimized and tuned system components for enhanced performance.
- Worked in close collaboration with the development teams to enhance the software stack's performance, scalability, reliability, and security. Supported application configuration for deployment, scalability, monitoring, and other automation tasks.
Technologies: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon EC2, Autoscaling, Jenkins, Ansible, NGINX, Linux, CentOS, ELK (Elastic Stack), Bash, Ruby on Rails (RoR), WordPress, AWS DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), DevOps, Linux Server Administration, Linux Administration, CI/CD Pipelines, Networking, Continuous Integration (CI), Amazon Route 53, Amazon RDS
DevOps Engineer
2018 - 2019
Jeeny (EasyTaxi MiddleEast)
- Analyzed and improved the stack to identify and eliminate performance bottlenecks and points of failure.
- Tested, debugged, and troubleshot platform, operating system, and network-level problems.
- Collaborated with the development teams to enhance system reliability, performance, security, and deliverability.
Technologies: Puppet, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon EC2, Amazon CloudFront CDN, DNS, Hiera, Jenkins, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), Docker, AWS DevOps, AWS Certified DevOps Engineer, DevOps, CI/CD Pipelines, Networking, Continuous Integration (CI), Amazon Route 53, Amazon RDS
Cloud Engineer
2016 - 2017
Vaporvm
- Deployed, administered, and maintained new and existing OpenStack, CloudStack, AWS, and other IaaS platforms.
- Deployed open-source solutions to analyze and monitor services, performance, resource utilization, and error troubleshooting such as Elastic Stack (ELK Stack) and Zenoss deployment for in-depth analytics and NMS of the company’s cloud environment.
- Designed architecture and led the migration to SDN and NFV, using Juniper Contrail, vSRX firewalls, QFX switches, Red Hat OpenStack, and custom VNFs.
- Documented deployments and operational tasks into SOPs to assist junior team members and the support team.
Technologies: OpenStack, Juniper, Cisco, Linux, CentOS, Debian, ELK (Elastic Stack), Bash, IPsec, VPN, IP Networks, Software-defined Networking (SDN), Linux Administration, Linux Server Administration, Networking
Experience
Migration of a High-traffic Website to AWS
https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/pakwheels/Migrated a high-traffic website, with more than 30 million annual users, from a traditional data-center environment with no-ops set up to a modern AWS-based environment with CI/CD pipelines, zero downtime blue/green deployments, proper monitoring, log analytics, operational SOPs, and most importantly, a DevOps mindset. AWS featured this migration in a case study.
Domain Fronting to Bypass ISP Restrictions
After a spat, ISPs blocked our company's services. I built a system using AWS Lambda, S3, and Cloudfront to bypass the ISP blockade by using Cloudfront to proxy traffic to our back end, S3 to resolve the CloudFront hostname, and three Lambda functions to rotate CloudFront endpoints and update records in S3.
Open Source Contributions to K8s (Kubespray), AWS (CloudFormation, EKS, CloudWatch Agent) and More
https://lnkd.in/dji8NFqRI have been contributing code to a Kubernetes SIGs project, Kubespray.
I have also contributed to multiple AWS repos, and various AWS teams have merged several of my pull requests.
• aws-quickstart/quickstart-amazon-eks
• aws/amazon-cloudwatch-agent
• aws-quickstart/quickstart-linux-utilities
Apart from these, I have also created a Jenkins plugin in the past and made various contributions to other smaller projects.
I have also contributed to multiple AWS repos, and various AWS teams have merged several of my pull requests.
• aws-quickstart/quickstart-amazon-eks
• aws/amazon-cloudwatch-agent
• aws-quickstart/quickstart-linux-utilities
Apart from these, I have also created a Jenkins plugin in the past and made various contributions to other smaller projects.
Migration of a Microservices Stack from AWS EC2 plus Puppet to Kubernetes
Migrated a very complex microservices-based stack managed by Puppet and Hieradata to Kubernetes by interfacing Helm with the same Hieradata repo.
The project included setting up infrastructure, using CloudFormation, containerizing PHP and Go applications, writing Kubernetes manifests for these applications, converting Kubernetes into Helm charts, separating configurations into Hieradata, and building CI/CD pipelines in Jenkins for seamless deployments.
The configuration was kept under version control in five git repositories, leading to end-to-end GitOps and infrastructures-as-code (IaC).
The project included setting up infrastructure, using CloudFormation, containerizing PHP and Go applications, writing Kubernetes manifests for these applications, converting Kubernetes into Helm charts, separating configurations into Hieradata, and building CI/CD pipelines in Jenkins for seamless deployments.
The configuration was kept under version control in five git repositories, leading to end-to-end GitOps and infrastructures-as-code (IaC).
Monitoring Solution on Elastic Stack to Process 20 Million Logs Per Day
I built an extremely cost-effective monitoring solution for a high-traffic startup that received upwards of 20 million requests per day. This allowed the teams to effectively monitor service health, debug issues, and analyze traffic patterns.
The solution was based on a self-managed Elasticsearch cluster running on cheap, bare metal servers, multiple cron jobs that synced ALB logs from S3 to Elasticsearch, a custom-ingest pipeline to extract relevant fields from logs, and custom dashboards on Kibana to visualize the data.
The solution was based on a self-managed Elasticsearch cluster running on cheap, bare metal servers, multiple cron jobs that synced ALB logs from S3 to Elasticsearch, a custom-ingest pipeline to extract relevant fields from logs, and custom dashboards on Kibana to visualize the data.
Certifications
NOVEMBER 2018 - NOVEMBER 2024
AWS Certified DevOps Engineer Professional
AWS
Skills
Tools
ELK (Elastic Stack), Ansible, Jenkins, NGINX, AWS CloudFormation, Amazon CloudFront CDN, Amazon EKS, Amazon CloudWatch, Puppet, Helm, Terraform, GitHub, GitLab, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), VPN, ActiveMQ, Git, AWS IAM, Kibana, Boto 3, AWS Fargate, CircleCI
Paradigms
DevOps, Continuous Integration (CI), Software-defined Networking (SDN), Microservices
Platforms
Kubernetes, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Linux, CentOS, Debian, Amazon EC2, Amazon Linux, Docker, AWS Lambda, OpenStack, WordPress, Apache Kafka, AWS ALB, Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
Languages
Bash, Python, Python 3
Storage
Amazon S3 (AWS S3), MongoDB, Hiera, Elasticsearch
Frameworks
Ruby on Rails (RoR)
Other
Autoscaling, DNS, HTTPS, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), AWS DevOps, AWS Certified DevOps Engineer, Linux Administration, Linux Server Administration, CI/CD Pipelines, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), Amazon Route 53, GitHub Actions, Amazon RDS, Cloudflare, Networking, Juniper, Cisco, IPsec, IP Networks, Filebeat, Serverless
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