[Kazhakootam]
[Trivandrum,Kerala,India]
[akhilthomas236@gmail.com]

Highly skilled Senior DevOps and Cloud Engineer with extensive experience in Linux, Bash scripting, Ansible, Jenkins, Git, and a strong knowledge of Terraform, AWS, and Kubernetes. Proficient in using EKS as runtime, with a solid understanding of CloudOps and DevSecOps. Experienced in vulnerability management, patching, and middleware engineering with expert-level knowledge in IBM tools such as ACE, MQ, and DataPower. Knowledgeable in API management tools like Apigee and Kafka, with a proven track record of implementing security mediations and TLS configurations on Spring Boot, Tomcat, MQ, ACE, and DataPower.

• Continuous Integration and Deployment:

  • Managed all aspects of continuous integration, source code management, and deployment processes.
  • Focused on source code repository management, software build quality, and environment provisioning processes.
  • Collaborated with delivery and infrastructure teams to promote and drive processes towards achieving a continuously deployable and highly automated environment.

• Continuous Deployment:

  • Automated provision and deployment of applications to WAS Express, WAS Enterprise, IIB, BPM, DP, Tomcat, and Spring Boot.
  • Managed Jenkins, Git, SVN, and Nexus to create reusable processes to achieve a high level of automation in continuous integration and deployment.

• Environments:

  • Accountable for the management of all development and testing environments.
  • Monitored and maintained physical and cloud environments.
  • Supported associated infrastructure, including networking, storage, virtual, physical, and cloud machines.

• Configuration Management:

  • Used Ansible to create and manage playbooks for a wide range of configuration management and automation tasks.
  • Good understanding of Ansible Automation Platform for orchestrating complex workflows and automating tasks.
  • Used Python virtual environment to set up Ansible runtime, developed automation scripts to create virtual environments, install Ansible modules, and perform tests.
  • Created Ansible scripts for provisioning resources.

• DevSecOps:

  • Utilized Nexus IQ, SonarQube, and GitHub's GHAS for security and compliance in the development lifecycle.
  • Implemented pre-commit hooks for code quality checks for Ansible, Jenkins, and Terraform.
  • Ensured security and compliance through DevSecOps practices and vulnerability management.

• Infrastructure as Code:

  • Extensively used Terraform to manage cloud resources.
  • Set up Backup Vaults, IAM Analyzer, and Backup Audit Manager.

• Automation and Scripting:

  • Created GitHub Action runners and set up a self-hosted action runner.
  • Set up and managed Jenkins on a container runtime (EKS cluster) and managed its configuration as code.
  • Implemented reverse proxy for SSL offloading using HAProxy and HTTPD.

• Teamwork:

  • Displayed a high level of collaboration and engagement within the DevOps engineering team.
  • Engaged in project initiations to identify early deployment challenges and ensure appropriate non-functional user stories are raised in an Agile manner.
  • Mentored, guided, and helped remove obstacles to achieve future-state goals.
  • Kept abreast of upcoming architectural changes and worked collaboratively on implementing infrastructure changes.

• Continuous Improvement:

  • Continuously looked for opportunities to improve and contributed to knowledge sharing activities.
  • Promoted knowledge sharing among team members to enable a high-performing cross-functional team.

• Part of WMB to IIB migration and IIB to ACE migration, as well as MQ migration.
• Expert knowledge on MQ clustering.
• Developed automation scripts for ACE and MQ management.
• Designed and implemented global cache setup for ACE.
• Developed high-quality reusable subflows for logging and error handling.
• Worked on different integrations like Kafka, HTTP, and MQ.
• Good knowledge of secured file transfer and IBM's MQFTE tool.
• Developed and deployed DataPower-based solutions.
• Part of DataPower migration, created automated scripts to verify DataPower objects.
• Built automated checks and deployment over SOMA interface of DataPower using Ant scripts.
• Managed deployment and build scripts for ACE and MQ packaging.
• Developed scripts for upgrading and managing ACE/MQ.

• Operating Systems: Linux
• Scripting: Bash, Python
• Configuration Management: Ansible, Ansible Automation Platform
• CI/CD Tools: Jenkins, Git, SVN, Nexus
• Infrastructure as Code: Terraform
• Cloud Platforms: AWS (EKS, EC2, S3, RDS)
• Containerization: Docker, Kubernetes
• Middleware: IBM ACE, MQ, DataPower
• API Management: Apigee
• Messaging: Kafka
• Security: DevSecOps, TLS implementation, Nexus IQ, SonarQube, GitHub's GHAS
• Automation Tools: HAProxy, HTTPD

Bachelor of Science in [Electronics and Communications]

• CKA: Certified Kubernetes Administrator - The Linux Foundation
• HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate (003) - HashiCorp
• Certified Jenkins Engineer - CloudBees
• AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate - Amazon Web Services (AWS)
• PCEP – Certified Entry-Level Python Programmer - Python Developer
• IBM Certified Solution Developer - Integration Bus v10.0 - IBM