Athiqur Rahman

DevOps Engineer working with Kubernetes in production since 2016, with a background in datacentre networking (BGP, OSPF, multi-homed edge) and Linux at scale. At Solo.io I am technical owner for enterprise accounts running Istio and API gateways across tens to hundreds of clusters.

I work from root cause to production: reproducing customer failures in a lab kubernetes environment, finding the fault across the full stack, hardware, kernel, and up to the application layer.

Customer Success Engineer / Technical Account Manager - Solo - USA remote

(2024-11)

Enabled customers to adopt and operate Istio and Solo Gloo across complex multi-cluster environments through Kubernetes expertise and technical account management.

• Building trust and credibility with customers by understanding business priorities, operational constraint and infrastructure, providing advice and communicating risk clearly that will get the customer to their objective in the desired timeframe
• Translating customer requirements into actionable plans and working with their various teams to resolve blocker to production readiness. This leads to long term customer confidence after seeing solutions relating to outcomes such as reliability.
• Informing the customer architecture ranging from tens to hundreds of Kubernetes cluster, GKE, EKS, AKS, OpenShift, advising on issues rearing traffic management, security, failure, scalability and upgrade strategies
• Owned complicated technical issues, troubleshooting across full request path, diagnosing k8s networking, DNS, MTLS, Envoy and Istio control plane issue. investigation interaction between apps, gateway, service mesh and underlying infrastructure. Doing protocol level analysis,Reproducing customer scenarios in my local environment so I can find/confirm I can do RCA and validate solutions
• Coordinating escalating customer issues to engineering and product teams, communicating business impact, supply reproducers and suggesting possible fixes and workarounds.

Senior DevOps Engineer - Ellitpic - London

(2021-08 - 2024-10)

As owner/operator of the Kubernetes estate, I drove the transformation of the Kubernetes environment at Elliptic

• Reduced EKS Upgrade Maintenance Window by 80%: Identified a bottleneck in our cluster upgrade process (5-day window) and implemented a Blue/Green deployment strategy with Terraform, CircleCI, FluxCD, ExternalDNS and custom scripts.
• Transformed User Security and IAM Credential Management: Moved away from IAM OIDC and Implemented AWS SSO with Terraform to centralize user authentication for both the AWS CLI, UI and EKS Kubernetes, resulting in more streamlined security in the organization; introduced Hashicorp Vault Enterprise to replace secrets management and help with zero trust
• Boosted production Deployments by 50% by improving our deployment process: Upgraded and redesigned our GitOps FluxCD, resulting improved developer experience for prod deployments; Setup Istio Service mesh and Flagger to facilitate traffic mirroring for testing deployments in a production environment and empowers developers to conduct canary releases with progressive traffic shifting; created a test environment that replicated prod to give developers more confidence in their testing stage.
• Empowered Junior Engineers and Fostered Team Autonomy: Implemented a training programme to upskill junior members of the team which resulted in increased developer self-sufficiency, as evidenced by significant reduction in request for assistance on routine tasks
• Delivered a Secure and Cost Effective On-Premise CI Pipeline with Kubernetes: Played a key role in migrating our CI pipeline from cloud based CircleCI to on premise runners on EKS; This enhanced security by minimizing external access to our AWS environment and reduced costs
• Simplified and Enhanced AWS Cross account Traffic with Transit Gateway: We moved from a complex network of peered VPCs to a centralized Transit Gateway account using Terraform IaC, eliminating manual peering configurations, reducing errors, and simplifying network management; Improved security visibility with a single control point for traffic flow, enabling centralized monitoring/auditing.

Senior DevOps Engineer - KPMG - London

(2019-11 - 2021-07)

• Integrated GCP project creation into custom billing solution, streamlining financial tracking process.
• Enhanced GCP cloud security by integrating Hashicorp Vault into our Jenkins CI/CD pipeline, providing short-lived credentials, and reducing potential security risks.
• Streamlined AWS image provisioning with Packer with Ansible, ensuring gold images met stringent security standards.
• Automated cloud infrastructure deployments with Terraform, achieving consistent and error-free environment setup.
• Established monitoring protocols to identify rogue/zombie EC2 Instances using CloudWatch, SNS, Python Lambda with the Boto3. To test this, I wrote a rigorous testing framework using the moto library to mock AWS environment.

Senior DevOps Engineer - Essense (WPP company) - London

(2018-01 - 2019-07)

• Transformed CI/CD process by combining code repositories and switching from Jenkins and Bitbucket to GitLab CI/CD with local runners within the GKE cluster.
• Moving away from Jenkins DSL to GitLab CI/CD pipeline improved developer autonomy to test and deploy their applications, leading significant reduction in support request more doubled the amount of deploys per week
• Used GKE cluster to run GitLab runners across multiple regions to give faster deploy times and resiliency
• Improved infrastructure management and version control by utilizing Terraform and Deployment Manager for IaC, leading to more scalable, immutable and resilient environments.

DevOps - Tangent - London/Newcastle

(2016-04 - 2017-11)

Transitioned from Systems Engineer to DevOps Engineer, rapidly learning cloud tech, Docker, microservices, CI/CD, and config management. Thrived as the company's sole DevOps Engineer despite no prior experience

• Spearheaded the implementation of the first Kubernetes cluster. This enabled easy scaling, HA, and streamlined application deployments across the entire company. Optimized the company’s ability to handle high yield traffic volume and scale efficiently.
• Cut deployment time and improved performance by 50% by partnering with developers to migrate Labour Party apps written in PHP and Python from monoliths to containerised microservices on Kubernetes.
• Executed a zero-downtime upgrade of the Labour Party’s 1TB MySQL database. Averted a planned downtime of a whole weekend by executing my plan of daisy-chained replication across laddered MySQL versions, from On prem to cloud and back, ensuring data integrity throughout the process.
• Resolved critical database inconsistencies to maintain service availability for major clients like SAP
• Reduced Sky PubFinder latency spikes by 80% by migrating from VM’s to AWS ECS and configuring scaling based on request latency.
• Bolstered Security by Implemented secure password and certificate management using Hashicorp Vault,
• administered over 200 CentOS/Ubuntu servers Utilizing SaltStack, enabling consistent and automated infrastructure.

Senior Systems Engineer - Telecom2 Ltd - London

(2009 - 2016)

Owned all technical operations as the first employee, supporting revenue growth from £11k to £1m per month within three years.

• Single handedly established the company's IT infrastructure
• Administered the security of 100 physical Linux servers, 200 Virtual Machines across 4 co-located datacentres across 3 countries, all interconnected Fibre and OpenSSL VPN for site to site and Road Warrior for users.
• All Data Center networking configured using Cisco Switches and Routers, Open Source routing tools like Quagga and Vyos, optimised for QoS VoIP traffic, running OSPF and BGP for multi homed edge routing with Tier1 ISP like Cogent, GTT, Gamma etc
• Configure all core internal systems such as DNS with PowerDNS, BIND, DJBDNS, HTTP servers with Apache and Nginx, all PCI DSS Compliant
• Database cluster consisting of 20 MySQL nodes of multi master and slave setup, configuring backups, replication and optimization
• Overall Observability and monitoring using Nagios, SNMP, Solarwinds
• Architected and Built the Telephony infrastructure
• Setup high availability VoIP System with Asterisk and OpenSIP, these consisted of Sangoma cards with DAHDI driver that with interconnect to E1 network over EuroISDN
• Wrote over a 100 IVR services with PHP
• Used Wireshark regularly to troubleshoot network quality issues
• Created my own SS7 Switch and interconnected with ONO use open source libSS7 stack in Spain
• Single handedly Maintained 24/7 On-Call Availability:
• Independently Managed all Spending for Strategic IT Investments

Computer Systems Engineering - City University London