Building secure networking infrastructure at scale
For two years, I led DevOps efforts for Cipherscale (OpenVPN), helping launch their new generation of secure, scalable services.
Overview
- Managed Kubernetes clusters across development, staging, and production environments on cloud-based platforms.
- Configured secrets management and certificate issuance using Vault, cert-manager, and automated PKI / Let's Encrypt integration.
- Implemented end-to-end observability: metrics, logs, traces, and events. Built dashboards and wired alerts to messaging platforms.
- Ran load tests and performance analysis to identify bottlenecks and right-size resources. Reduced cloud spend without touching reliability targets.
- Integrated an API gateway layer for backend service aggregation, centralising authentication and rate limiting.
- Deployed core infrastructure using Terraform and GitOps practices for Kubernetes. All infrastructure was version-controlled and reproducible.
- Defined project roadmaps and priorities, wearing multiple hats as the single Ops engineer for the bulk of the engagement.
What I did
- Backend
- Infrastructure
- DevOps
- Observability
- Kubernetes
- AWS
- Terraform
- Vault
- ArgoCD
- Prometheus
- Grafana
I worked with Javier for nearly two years in building out the infrastructure for a new product team, and he took the lead building (and documenting) the new infrastructure, coming up with suggestions for stress and performance test frameworks for QA, and mapping our scalability discovery and testing tasks as well as numerous other tasks. As the single Ops person for the bulk of that period he was willing to wear multiple hats outside the strict confines of DevOps and kept the project up and running. I liked working with him and am certain he will be extremely effective in the DevOps role in any organization.
OpenVPN® is a registered trademark of OpenVPN Inc. All product names, logos, and brands are property of their respective owners. This case study is for portfolio purposes only.