Vishal Patel
Verified Expert in Engineering
DevOps Engineer and Software Developer
Ottawa, ON, Canada
Toptal member since May 6, 2022
Vishal is a DevOps and Kubernetes architect with over four years of experience designing, implementing, and managing production-ready Kubernetes infrastructure and its cloud-native tools in hybrid environments. He has worked on setting up Infrastructure as code and CI/CD process baselines and helped in organization-wide adaptation.
Portfolio
Experience
- Continuous Delivery (CD) - 5 years
- Kubernetes - 4 years
- Terraform - 4 years
- DevOps - 4 years
- Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) - 4 years
- Azure - 4 years
- Docker - 4 years
- Argo CD - 4 years
Availability
Preferred Environment
Kubernetes, Linux, Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), Docker, Azure, Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)
The most amazing...
...achievement I’ve had is learning new DevOps tools and Kubernetes-related concepts, achieving all three certifications of Kubernetes in a short period.
Work Experience
Senior Consultant/Lead | DevOps | SRE | Kubernetes Cloud Architect
Self-employed (Project Based)
- Handled the managed cloud and Kubernetes on-prem infrastructure. Acted as a Kubernetes architect and trainer. Trained the Linux administrator team for Kubernetes and OpenShift applications and managed the container infra, including lifecycle.
- Worked in the government sector. Automated an on-premise Kubernetes infrastructure using a Terraform/Crossplane framework and GitLab pipeline. Architected an AKS using IaC practices per the enterprise's landing zone practices.
- Introduced DevOps practices to developers by creating a knowledge base and setting up a local environment with Docker, Kubernetes, and Kind. Tools like Kaniko and Skaffold helped streamline development, allowing developers to focus on coding and release often.
- Led the design and architecture of landing zones in GCP Azure for sectors. Established a flexible infrastructure setup for single and multi-tenant environments, ensuring compliance with frameworks like NIST 800-53.
- Implemented protected B landing zones in the cloud, customizing them to meet team needs. Developed Terraform modules for networking, security, and infrastructure and led sessions on automating infra while integrating metrics, scaling, alerts, and backup.
- Played a hands-on role in migrating workloads across cross-cloud by creating detailed migration checklists and automating the process. Helped development teams containerize and move legacy applications.
- Built and managed ArgoCD in a pull-based GitOps setup, ensuring reliable deployments across multiple clusters. Tweaked sync settings, automated rollback strategies, and fine-tuned application sets for better efficiency.
- Worked with GitHub Actions to complement ArgoCD, setting up deployment gates and approval workflows. Focused on security and compliance while maintaining a smooth CI/CD process.
- Designed and implemented progressive deployment strategies using Tekton and Argo Rollouts. Set up canary and blue-green releases to reduce risk and improve rollback mechanisms.
- Streamlined GitOps workflows by leveraging Kargo for automated promotion across environments. Easy interface to view all details on a single dashboard.
Senior Consultant
Microsoft Professional Service (via a Consulting Company)
- Recommended best practices for cloud service integration multi-region deployments (Terraform, Azure ARM, Bicep).
- Evaluated client requirements for a container-based architecture and architecture-designed landing zones using Azure Kubernetes Service and Azure Red Hat OpenShift solutions. Also helped with cloud migration from AWS to Azure or GCP to Azure when necessary.
- Delivered security awareness sessions for cloud services and cloud-native tools. Provided a plan of action to implement.
- Showcased how to containerize legacy applications with modern frameworks and microservices benefits. Promoted blue-green/canary deployments.
- Automated Kubernetes upgrades and enhanced observability through logging and monitoring data.
- Partnered with stakeholders to build effective teams based on skill sets and business needs. Worked with the client for team formation and aligned day two operations based on organization process and procedure.
- Architected infrastructure automation with Crossplane and Azure Service Operator, allowing Kubernetes-native management of Azure resources. Created reusable modules to simplify provisioning and scaling.
Google Cloud Platform Engineer
Priceline - GCP
- Wrote Python script to generate a multi-cluster manifest of Cloudability and New Relic and encrypted secrets using sops.
- Investigated and debugged pod and node scaling, pod disruption, and budget-related issues to minimize business impact from unavailable applications when performing lifecycle management of GKE or related cloud-native tools.
- Enabled webhook admission controller to forcefully apply and mutate limits to manifest new workloads, including renewing certificate pairs. Suggested patterns to automate this process by using a cert-manager.
Experience
Kubernetes Infrastructure on Premises | Cloud Agnostic Bare-metal
It can also be deployed in the air gap zone when the container images are imported to the registry successfully.
Education
Master’s Degree in Electrical and Computer
Carleton University - Ottawa, Canada
Certifications
Certified Kubernetes Security Specialist
The Linux Foundation
AZ-303: Microsoft Azure Architect Technologies
Microsoft
Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect Expert
Microsoft
Aviatrix Certified Engineer Multicloud Network Associate
Aviatrix
Certified Kubernetes Application Developer
The Linux Foundations
Certified Kubernetes Administrator
The Linux Foundations
Skills
Libraries/APIs
Azure API Management, Terragrunt
Tools
Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Helm, Grafana, Apache, Terraform, Git, Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR), Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), GitLab CI/CD, Jenkins, Vagrant, GitLab, GitHub, Jira, HashiCorp, Kubernetes HorizontalPodAutoscaler (HPA), Splunk, Ansible, Istio, ELK (Elastic Stack), Azure Key Vault, Docker Compose, Azure Network Security Groups, Confluence, Artifactory, Amazon EKS, AWS IAM, Sentinel, SonarQube, Systemd, VPN, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), AWS CloudFormation, Kibana, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), CircleCI, Kong, Apache Airflow
Paradigms
DevOps, Azure DevOps, Continuous Integration (CI), Continuous Delivery (CD), Management, Microservices, Microservices Architecture, DevSecOps, Continuous Development (CD), DDoS
Platforms
Kubernetes, Docker, Amazon Web Services (AWS), DigitalOcean, Ubuntu, OpenShift, Linux, Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Rancher, New Relic, Amazon EC2, OpenStack, Apache Kafka, Azure PaaS, Azure AI Studio
Languages
Python, YAML, Markdown, Bash
Frameworks
Flux, Windows PowerShell, Crossplane, OAuth 2
Storage
Azure Blobs, Amazon S3 (AWS S3), Datadog, Elasticsearch
Other
Task Analysis, High-availability Systems, DevOps Engineer, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), Solution Architecture, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), Containers, Infrastructure, CI/CD Pipelines, Cloud, Cloud Computing, Microsoft Azure, Scripting, Cloud Infrastructure, Pipelines, Technical Hiring, Source Code Review, Interviewing, Security, APIs, Back-end, Load Balancers, Azure Resource Manager (ARM), API Management, Cloudflare, Containerization, Amazon API Gateway, Site Reliability, GitOps, Cloud Security, IT Support, Prometheus, GitHub Actions, Service Meshes, DNS Debugging, Shell Scripting, Azure Virtual Networks, Cost Reduction & Optimization (Cost-down), ECS, Scalability, Orchestration, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Argo CD, Flux CD, Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), Virtualization, Kubernetes Operations (kOps), Linux Administration, Vulnerability Management, Vulnerability Identification, AWS DevOps, Architecture, Hypervisors, Networking, Team Leadership, Linux Server Administration, High Availability Disaster Recovery (HADR), Hardware Security Modules (HSMs), HSM, Aviatrix
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