Freelancer

• Kubernetes
• Helm
• Terraform
• GCP
• CI/CD
• IaC
• Working Remotely

Project period: January 2019 - August 2019

The client approached me since their current infrastructure was manually stitched together via the UI of their cloud provider. In the end it became hard to understand and maintain. My project therefore was about re-building their infrastructure and providing automation for the new setup.

Following a short summary of how I successfully approached the project:

Design process: For a project to be successful, you have to listen to your client closely and evaluate their requirements. I gathered the needed information by talking about their development process and investigating their existing setup. With those requirements, I evaluated different alternative implementation possibilities with the tools they already bought (e.g. their CI/CD and cloud vendor). Keeping everything low-cost was important.

Implementation: When I started to implement the design, IaC and full automation were especially crucial since everything should outlive my time at the company and future maintenance should be as easy as possible. To further improve maintainability, I used a minimum of custom scripting and relied on industry standard tools (e.g. Helm and Terraform) whenever applicable.

Agile process: To get quick feedback from the client, I iteratively ported the existing infrastructure to the new setup. By keeping close contact to the client, each step was validated to ensure that it fits into the daily business of the development team. Features where adjusted and the design was updated whenever requirements changed.

I finished the project successfully and the client is running the setup since then. They are also able to extend and adapt as requirements change.