Balakrishnan C

VVDN Technologies Pvt Ltd

Jan 2021 to Present

Role: Senior CloudOps & DevOps Engineer

• DevOps & CloudOps Engineer with 4+ years of experience in designing scalable cloud platforms, automating infrastructure provisioning and managing deployments in production environments.
• Strong command-line skills with hands-on experience in Linux administrator tasks.
• Hands-on experience with Git and GitHub for managing code repositories, branching strategies, and team collaboration.
• Proficient in automating CI/CD pipelines using GitHub Actions, AWS CodePipeline, CodeBuild, and CodeDeploy for efficient and scalable deployments.
• Specialist in building and managing scalable AWS environments using services like EC2, VPC, IAM, RDS, S3, ECS, EKS, EFS, ELB, CDN, Route53, Lambda, API Gateway and etc.
• Expertise in defining infrastructure as code IaC using Terraform for consistent and repeatable infrastructure management and hands-on experience with Terraform modules, state management and remote state backends.
• Basic Python programming and Shell scripting skills for scripting and automation the regular tasks.
• Hands-on experience in building, packaging, and deploying containerized applications using Docker and Docker Compose.
• Built custom AI-integrated Lambda automation workflows for disk cleanup, OS patching, internal notifications to Google Chat Spaces and AWS resources creation.
• Skilled in designing highly available and fault-tolerant architectures using Load Balancers (ALB/NLB), Auto Scaling Groups, Amazon CloudFront and AWS Global Accelerator to ensure performance, reliability and global content delivery.
• Hands-on experience managing Windows Server environments, including configuring IIS web servers and administering Active Directory for authentication, user access, and group policies.
• Hands-on experience with Kubernetes for deploying, scaling, and managing containerized applications using resources like Deployments, Services, ConfigMaps and Helm charts.
• Hands-on experience with custom linux command, service and package creation across Amazon Linux, RHEL, and Fedora distributions.

Managing and Monitoring AWS Cloud Infrastructure for Web Applications

Technologies: IAM Roles & Policies | EC2 | S3 | ELB/Target Group | Autoscaling Group | CDN | WAF | RDS | ActiveMQ | WAF | CloudWatch | GuardDuty | Security Hub | Jenkins | Shell Scripting | Ansible | Tomcat Webserver

• VPC Expertise: In building scalable and secure AWS network topologies using VPCs, subnets, route tables, internet gateways (IGWs), NAT gateways, VPC peering, security groups, and NACLs for effective traffic control and network isolation.
• IAM Expertise: Implemented secure and scalable IAM structures using roles, groups, policies, and RBAC, aligned with AWS best practices and Organizations for centralized governance.
• EC2 Management: Launched, configured, and managed Amazon EC2 instances (Linux 1, 2, 3/Ubuntu/Windows) to support diverse application workloads, including key pair setup, SG / EBS volume / user-data scripting management and AMI creation.
• Load Balancing & Auto Scaling: Configured Application and Network Load Balancers (ALB/NLB) with target groups and integrated Auto Scaling Groups (ASG) to distribute traffic efficiently, maintain high availability, and dynamically scale resources based on demand.
• Zero Downtime Deployments: Delivered seamless application rollouts using blue-green and rolling update strategies, ensuring zero downtime and safe rollback through the use of multiple target groups with ALB.
• CI/CD Pipelines: Automated build, test, and deployment workflows using Jenkins to implement continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) practices across (Dev, QA, Stg, Prod) environments.
• Collaboration and Automation: Collaborating with teams to resolve bugs, handling incidents, and service requests, while automating configuration changes with Shell scripting and Ansible playbooks for streamlined infrastructure management.
• Application Exposure: Set up Nginx and Tomcat to host and expose web applications securely using HTTP/HTTPS ports.
• Database Management: Configured and maintained highly available, Multi-AZ RDS MySQL Engine databases with secure access from EC2 instances for resilient.
• Monitoring & Alerting: Created CloudWatch dashboards with custom metrics, configured CPU and memory usage alarms, and integrated with PagerDuty, SNS and SES for real-time alerting and incident response.
• Security & Traffic Filtering: Integrated AWS WAF with ALB and CloudFront to filter traffic, block malicious IP addresses and strengthen application security.
• Network Egress Control: Enforced outbound domain-level filtering using AWS Network Firewall, allowing EC2 access only to approved domains while blocking potentially harmful or unapproved endpoints.
• SSL Configuration: Provisioned and managed ACM certificates to enable HTTPS for applications behind ALB and CloudFront, ensuring encrypted communication and strong SSL/TLS security practices.
• DNS & Domain Management: Configured Amazon Route 53 public hosted zones with A/CNAME records and failover routing policies to securely deliver multi-region applications via ALB and CloudFront.

Migration of Windows Service-Based Applications to AWS ECS Containers

Technologies: Windows IIS | Windows Active Directory (AD) | Windows Services | Self-Signed Entrust SSL | Docker / Containers | ECS Cluster | Task Definition | RDS | ASG | EC2 | EFS | ELB | Jenkins PipeLine | S3 | CDN | WAF | CloudWatch | Log Management

• Windows IIS & Windows Services: Deployed and managed .NET-based applications using IIS Web Server and Windows Services.
• Windows App Migration: Containerized legacy Windows services and migrated them to Amazon ECS, enabling scalable deployment, improved manageability and reduced operational overhead.
• ECS Containerization: Configured ECS clusters and task definitions to deploy Dockerized applications using images from Amazon ECR repos.
• CI/CD Integration: Automated build and deployment workflows using parameterized Jenkins pipelines, including GitHub cloning, Docker image creation, ECR push and ECS service updation for all Dev, QA, Stg and Prod Environments.
• Service Mapping and Autoscaling: Deployed ECS services on ASG-managed EC2 instances and integrated with ALB Target Groups to distribute traffic using round-robin routing to healthy hosts for high availability and balanced performance.
• Database Integration: Connected ECS services to a centralized Amazon RDS instance for backend data retrieval, ensuring secure, consistent and low-latency access across containers.
• Active Directory: Managed AD users and groups by adding/removing new servers to AD, assigning them to appropriate groups and enforcing access control using Active Directory Group Policies to allow only authorized users.
• Edge Caching & CDN Integration: Integrated Amazon CloudFront with ALB and S3 assets to enable low-latency, global content delivery through edge caching, enhancing performance and availability for distributed users.
• Security & Traffic Filtering: Integrated AWS WAF with ALB and CloudFront using managed rule sets and rate-based rules to filter malicious traffic.
• Log Management: Configured Docker containers to store logs on a centralized Amazon EFS mount, enabling persistent and shared access to logs across ECS tasks for auditing and troubleshooting.
• Secure Access Management: Configured a Bastion Host to enable SSH access to EC2 instances in private subnets, ensuring secure and controlled administrative entry.
• Regular Operations & Support: Performed routine infrastructure monitoring, patching, and vulnerability scanning using AWS Systems Manager, AWS Inspector, and CloudWatch. Identified security risks and applied fixes to EC2, RDS & etc.
• Cloud Monitoring: Enabled centralized monitoring by configuring Amazon CloudWatch across all AWS resources, including EC2, ECS, RDS, and Load Balancers, to ensure operational visibility, resource health tracking and proactive alerting.

S3OT Project: IaC Deployment of Entire AWS Infrastructure via GitHub Actions and Terraform Modules

Technologies: Terraform | TF Modules | IaC | GitHub | GitHub Actions | AWS VPC | Subnet & Route Table | ECS Cluster & Services | Docker / Container | Autoscaling | Load Balancer | Target Group | CloudWatch Log Group

• Infrastructure Provisioning: Provisioned the entire AWS infrastructure using Terraform’s official modules with a zero-code local approach.
• Terraform official modules: AWS VPC, Subnet, Route Tables, Route Association, ECS Cluster, Services, Task Definition, ECR Repo, EFS Mapping, ALB and TG Mapping in single click.
• State Management: Ensured state locking, consistency, and version control via remote backends stored in S3 with DynamoDB for state locking.
• Terraform-Based Deployment: Integrated CI pipelines for Terraform plan & apply stages with environment-specific GitHub workflows.
• ECS Log Management: Enabled container logging for ECS tasks by routing logs to CloudWatch Log Groups, ensuring centralized visibility and persistent log storage.

Migration 2.0

Technologies: AWS Region Migration | Cross-region Replication | VPC | Subnetting | Route Tables | Transit Gateway | VPC Peering | AWS Resource Sharing | EC2 | AMI, EBS, EFS, RDS Snapshot | AWS Backup | Lift and Shift Migration

• Lift-and-Shift Migration: Executed a clean migration of EC2 instances from Linux 1 to Linux 2, maintaining configurations and ensuring seamless workload continuity.
• AWS Region Migration: Migrated all critical AWS resources including compute (EC2, EBS), networking (VPC, subnets, route tables, IGW, Peering, TGW), storage (S3) and load balancing (ALB) from one region to another to support disaster recovery, high availability and business continuity.
• Disaster Recovery Setup: Enabled backup and restore using AMIs, EBS snapshots and RDS backups, ensuring seamless recovery and failover support in the disaster recovery region.

Automation and AI POC

Technologies: AWS Lambda | Automatic Patching (SSM) | CloudWatch Agent Installation | Automatic Diskup | Automatic Alarm Setup | Bedrock (Knowledgebase) | NOC Automation | Google Chat Space | Automatic Deployment on S3 | Python Boto3 | AWS AI Tools (BedRock) | AIOps | ChatOps

• Jenkins-Based Automation: Developed a Jenkins pipeline with checkbox input to trigger the upload of selected files to corresponding Amazon S3 Buckets.
• Event-Driven Automation: Built an AWS Lambda function integrated with EventBridge to automatically create and delete CloudWatch alarms for EC2 instances launched via Auto Scaling Groups (ASG).
• Automated Remediation: Implemented a cross-platform disk cleanup solution for Linux and Windows EC2 instances using AWS Lambda and SSM Run Command, automating space recovery actions to prevent service disruption.
• ChatOps Integration: Automated NOC alert notifications from AWS CloudWatch using a Python (Boto3) script integrated with Google Chat Space webhooks, enabling real-time operational visibility and team collaboration via centralized alert channels.
• Patch Management Automation: Configured automated monthly OS patching for all EC2 instances using AWS Systems Manager Maintenance Windows.
• Monitoring Modernization: Migrated system-level observability from AppDynamics to Amazon CloudWatch by deploying the CloudWatch Agent across EC2 instances for Custom metrics for RAM and Disk usage.
• AI-Driven Knowledge Access: Built a serverless chatbot using Bedrock (Knowledgebase) with Amazon Nova Pro AI LLM Model and AWS Lambda to query Confluence pages. Enabled seamless, natural-language access to internal docs for faster team collaboration and insights.
• Custom .rpm Package Creation: Build and Published our own Linux .rpm Package on Fedora COPR, making it installable across Amazon Linux 2023, RHEL, EPEL, and Fedora distributions.