Alzhan N.

My Bio Hi, I’m Alzhan, a DevOps Engineer with over 5 years of experience in optimizing CI/CD pipelines and improving infrastructure efficiency, particularly within AWS environments. I’m currently based in Panama City, Florida, and I work remotely for Ampersand, a tech company in New York known for its innovative solutions in digital media and advertising technology. where I've been since May 2021, At Ampersand, I have led significant projects to reduce infrastructure costs and accelerate deployment processes through effective utilization of Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, and other automation tools. My technical skill set includes deep expertise in AWS, Docker, Docker Compose, Kubernetes, Terraform, GitHub Actions, and monitoring tools like Prometheus and Grafana. I have a strong background in creating and managing container-based microservices. Additionally, I’ve implemented strong security and disaster recovery strategies to ensure system resilience and compliance. In an effort to bridge the gap between operations and development teams, I've expanded my technical toolkit by learning JavaScript and Node.js. This has enhanced my understanding of the software development lifecycle, allowing more effective communication and collaboration with development colleagues. Before Ampersand, I worked at Epic Games, a leading company in the gaming industry. At Epic Games,where I improved CI/CD pipeline enhancements that improved deployment speeds and system security, crucial during major online gaming events. Working in such a dynamic, fast-paced setting really pushed me to sharpen both my tech skills and my ability to collaborate effectively. Outside of work, I engage in extreme hobbies like underwater cave diving, motorcycle riding, and boating. These activities have honed my ability to stay calm under pressure and tackle challenges with precision—qualities that I bring to my professional life as well. I hold a Bachelor's Degree in Computer Engineering and certifications as a Kubernetes Administrator and Application Developer. I’m excited about the possibility of bringing my background in cloud infrastructure and automation to your team. Looking forward to discussing how I can contribute to your projects and help achieve your company’s goals. My recent project I was tasked with creating a secure and scalable cloud infrastructure on AWS for deploying a new application. My responsibility was to build an EKS cluster that supported development and meet to strict security and performance standards in production. I started using Terraform to script the entire infrastructure setup to ensure consistency and reproducibility. I used EKS managed nodes for better management and scalability. The production environment was secured in a private subnet to enhance protection against external access. I deployed an NGINX Ingress controller within our Kubernetes cluster. I chose NGINX for its robustness and flexibility. The Ingress controller was configured to manage access to the services by routing external requests through an Application Load Balancer (ALB) that was placed in a public subnet. The ALB was set up to listen for incoming traffic and pass it to the Ingress controller securely. This setup ensured that our services were reachable externally without directly exposing the backend infrastructure. To keep it cost-effective and efficient, I used spot instances for our development and staging environments, while for our production environment, I relied on on-demand instances for reliability. I automated deployments with GitHub Actions and used Helm charts to ensure smooth and consistent updates across environments, Additionally, I integrated AWS Secrets Manager to store sensitive information like database credentials and API keys. Overall, the project successfully delivered a secure, scalable, and cost-effective infrastructure. The implementation of the NGINX controller combined with the ALB provided a secure method for external traffic to access our applications while maintaining the integrity of the private subnet and ensuring customer accessibility. The use of spot instances for non-production environments significantly reduced costs, and our on-demand instances in production ensured the reliability of our application. The creation of automated environments and pipelines reduced manual errors and streamlined our development process, allowing our team to focus more on development and less on deployment logistics.