Atif Iqbal

• Architected and managed multi-environment Kubernetes clusters (AKS, EKS, GKE, ARO, RKE2) across AWS, Azure, and
GCP for dev, QA, staging, and production — owning full end-to-end cluster lifecycle.
• Led migration of containerized production workloads from AKS to Azure Red Hat OpenShift (ARO), modernizing
deployment pipelines, adapting Helm charts and RBAC policies for OpenShifts security model, and ensuring zero-downtime
cutover.
• Deployed and managed workloads on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) — configured node pools, workload identity, GCP
IAM bindings, and integrated Cloud Storage and Cloud Monitoring for production observability.
• Configured AWS ALB with Kubernetes Ingress for external traffic routing and set up Azure Application Gateway for
Containers (AGC) for TLS termination, enabling secure, production-grade application exposure.
• Deployed and tuned Envoy Proxy in both sidecar and standalone modes for service mesh traffic management, load balancing,
retry policies, and circuit breaking.
• Embedded DevSecOps in the Helm release pipeline — enforced security contexts (runAsNonRoot, readOnlyRootFilesystem,
capability drops) and governed RBAC (Roles, ClusterRoles, Bindings) across all namespaces.
• Integrated External Secrets Operator with HashiCorp Vault and Azure Key Vault to sync secrets securely across all
Kubernetes environments — completely eliminating hardcoded credentials.
• Owned full Helm chart lifecycle: authored, versioned, and published charts to Artifact Hub as part of the official software
release process.
• Built and maintained Jenkins CI/CD pipelines with GitHub integration, and gained working exposure to Azure DevOps
Pipelines, triggering automated build-test-deploy workflows on commits and pull requests — reducing deployment time by
~60%.
• Automated scale-down of non-production Kubernetes environments during off-hours using CronJobs
(Shell/Python/PowerShell), eliminating idle resource spend across AWS, Azure, and GCP.
• Right-sized EC2 instances and AKS node pools based on actual workload telemetry; removed over-provisioned resources —
reducing monthly cloud billing by a significant margin.
• Identified and cleaned up orphaned cloud resources (unattached EBS volumes, idle Load Balancers, stale Azure disks)
through periodic audits — achieving measurable and sustained cost reduction.
• Leveraged AWS Spot Instances and Azure Spot VMs for non-critical and batch workloads, cutting compute costs without
impacting delivery timelines.
• Configured NFS-backed persistent storage (PV, PVC, StorageClass) for stateful workloads requiring shared or durable
volumes.
• Applied resource requests and limits on all Kubernetes workloads to prevent resource contention and ensure efficient bin
packing across cluster nodes.
• Provisioned cloud infrastructure (EC2, VPC, RDS, AKS, ARO, Azure Storage) using Terraform — ensuring consistent,
repeatable environments for dev and QA teams.
• Leveraged Claude.ai and Claude Code to automate Kubernetes debugging, Helm chart optimisation, and infrastructure
documentation — significantly reducing manual effort and turnaround time.
• Administered MySQL, SQL Server, and Oracle databases including backups, access control, performance tuning, and query
optimisation.
• Authored runbooks, RBAC policies, gateway configuration guides, and environment procedures to standardise DevOps
practices organisation-wide.

• Led Kubernetes migration project — authored Helm charts to standardise application deployments and reduce manual
configuration drift.
• Built and maintained CI/CD pipelines using Jenkins and GitLab CI, automating build, test, and deployment stages for
multiple microservices.
• Created Dockerfiles and shell scripts to build, tag, and push Docker images to Docker Hub and private registries as part of
the automated release process.
• Provisioned and managed AWS infrastructure including EC2 instances, VPC networking, Security Groups, IAM roles, and
S3 storage for dev and production environments.
• Configured AWS CloudWatch dashboards and alarms to proactively monitor infrastructure health, resource utilisation, and
trigger incident response actions.
• Deployed and managed Kubernetes workloads (Pods, Deployments, Services, ReplicaSets) and participated in on-call
rotations resolving production incidents using logs and monitoring dashboards.
• Implemented configuration management and server provisioning using Ansible and Terraform — reducing environment
setup time through repeatable, version-controlled automation.
• Set up Prometheus and Grafana monitoring stack for real-time visibility into application and infrastructure metrics with
custom alerting rules. Configured ELK Stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana) and Fluentd for centralised log aggregation, search, and analysis
across distributed services. Collaborated closely with development and QA teams to enable continuous testing and integration, accelerating the software
delivery cycle.