Atif Iqbal

• Set up and managed Kubernetes clusters (AKS, EKS, ARO, RKE2) on AWS and Azure for dev, QA,
staging, and production environments based on team requirements.
• Configured AWS ALB with Ingress for external traffic routing, and set up Azure Application Gateway for
Containers (AGC) for TLS termination and secure application exposure.
• Deployed and tuned Envoy Proxy (sidecar and standalone) for service-to-service traffic management,
load balancing, retry policies, and circuit breaking.
• Embedded DevSecOps in the Helm release pipeline — configured security contexts (runAsNonRoot,
readOnlyRootFilesystem, drop capabilities) and enforced Kubernetes RBAC (Roles, ClusterRoles,
Bindings) across all namespaces.
• Integrated External Secrets Operator with HashiCorp Vault and Azure Key Vault to manage and sync
secrets securely across Kubernetes environments, eliminating hardcoded credentials.
• Configured NFS-backed persistent storage (PV, PVC, StorageClass) for stateful workloads requiring
shared or durable volumes.
• Used Claude.ai and Claude Code to debug Kubernetes issues, optimise Helm charts, and accelerate
DevOps workflows — significantly reducing manual effort and turnaround time.
• Owned full Helm chart lifecycle — authored, updated, versioned charts, and published releases to
Artifact Hub as part of the official release process.
• Built and maintained Jenkins CI/CD pipelines integrated with GitHub, triggering automated build-test
deploy workflows on commits and pull requests.
• Automated scale-down of non-production Kubernetes environments during off-hours using CronJobs —
eliminating idle resource spend across AWS and Azure.
• Right-sized EC2 instances and AKS node pools based on actual workload usage — removed over
provisioned resources and reduced monthly cloud billing significantly.
• Identified and cleaned up unused cloud resources (unattached EBS volumes, orphaned snapshots, idle
Load Balancers, stale Azure disks) through periodic audits — achieving measurable cost reduction.
• Leveraged AWS Spot Instances and Azure Spot VMs for non-critical and batch workloads, significantly
lowering compute costs without impacting delivery timelines.
• Applied resource requests and limits on all Kubernetes workloads to prevent resource hogging and
ensure efficient bin-packing across cluster nodes.
• Managed AWS resources (EC2, S3, VPC, RDS, IAM) and Azure resources (AKS, Azure AD, Storage, AGC)
per application and team needs.
• Provisioned VMs on-demand using Terraform for dev and QA teams, ensuring consistent and repeatable
infrastructure.
• Administered MySQL, SQL Server, and Oracle databases — backups, access control, performance
tuning, and query optimisation.
• Documented runbooks, RBAC policies, gateway configs, and environment procedures to standardise
DevOps practices organisation-wide.