whoami
Surendar S V
Running resilient production on AWS, Linode & Kubernetes. 50+ servers, zero-fluff SRE & AI-driven ops tooling.
DevOps & SRE Engineer owning reliability, observability, and cloud infrastructure for a ~50-server production estate at Vakilsearch. I specialize in incident response and root-cause analysis, container orchestration with Kubernetes, observability (Grafana & Loki), and building developer tooling like internal MCP servers for AI-assisted operations. I also mentor aspiring engineers to build cloud-ready careers.
What I do
CI/CD & Release Automation
Building resilient delivery pipelines that accelerate release velocity and eliminate human error, leveraging GitHub Actions, Argo CD, Jenkins, and Octopus Deploy.
Cloud Infrastructure & FinOps
Architecting scalable, cost-optimized environments across AWS and Linode with Terraform IaC, rightsizing compute fleets, and curtailing CDN egress spikes.
Site Reliability & Observability
Maintaining 100% uptime with Grafana, Loki, Prometheus, and Datadog. Proactive alert routing, de-duplicated telemetry, and rigorous incident RCAs.
Kubernetes & Host Hardening
Orchestrating microservices with Kubernetes, Docker, and ingress-nginx. Hardening production servers with bastion-isolated SSH, least-privilege users, and systemd supervisors.
AI Operations & Mentorship
Building internal Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers enabling LLM agents to safely query ops data read-only. Mentoring aspiring engineers to master cloud systems.
Tools I work with
AWS
Azure
Docker
Kubernetes
Terraform
Ansible
Jenkins
Actions
Argo CD
Octopus
Grafana
Prometheus
Datadog
Splunk
Nginx
Postgres
Python
Bash
Linux
GitWhere I've been
DevOps Engineer
Vakilsearch
- Incident Response & RCA: Resolved 25+ production incidents across AWS, Linode, and Kubernetes; led RCAs on major outages, fixing ingress endpoint readiness (241 × 503) and host reboot recovery.
- Observability & Monitoring: Audited 50-server production estate; built dual Grafana dashboards (server health & Loki log analysis) and engineered automated 5-minute de-duplicated alert watchers.
- Cloud FinOps & Egress: Traced a 30× CloudFront egress spike (3.94 TB/week) to a single asset, specifying a 99.7% payload cut; built fleet utilization collectors for workload rightsizing.
- Host Security & Hardening: Rapidly contained and rebuilt production hosts with least-privilege users, per-repo deploy keys, jumpbox-only SSH, and PM2 under systemd.
- Safe Migrations: Planned multi-cloud migration of 20+ servers (Linode to E2E) with gated MongoDB validation; executed zero-downtime path cutovers and guarded production database cleanups.
- Internal AI Tooling: Built and extended an internal Model Context Protocol (MCP) server with 140+ read-only, PII-masked tools allowing LLM agents to safely inspect production telemetry.
DevOps Engineer
Movate Technologies
- Cut deployment time by 40% with automated CI/CD pipelines; shipped 50% more releases with 45-min shorter cycles.
- Managed 50+ containers on Kubernetes, reclaiming 20% wasted compute while maintaining 100% uptime across all production tiers.
- Owned incidents end to end, cutting recurring errors by 50%; engineered monitoring dashboards reducing cloud spend by 15%.
Consultant
Freelancing
- Training engineers from scratch on Cloud and DevOps — from basics to advanced skills
- Hands-on AWS infrastructure projects to build real-world experience
- Resume building and profile optimization for DevOps roles
- Interview preparation — mock interviews, system design, and technical walkthroughs
- Career guidance and roadmap planning for cloud and DevOps transitions
Things I've built
DevSecOps Pipeline — Netflix Clone on K8s
A full pipeline from code to Kubernetes — with security scanning, monitoring, and automated deployments built in from day one.
Recent articles
Serverless vs Containers — A Practical Comparison
I've run both in production. Here's when to pick serverless, when containers make more sense, and what the real cost trade-offs look like.
Read on Medium →Infrastructure as Code with Terraform
A beginner-friendly guide to Terraform — how to define your infrastructure in code, manage state, and avoid the mistakes I made early on.
Read on Medium →GitOps — A Beginner's Guide
What GitOps actually is, why it works, and how teams use Git to manage infrastructure the same way they manage code.
Read on Medium →Let's build
something together.
Got a project, a question, or just want to talk shop? I'm one message away.
"தெய்வத்தான் ஆகா தெனினும் முயற்சிதன் மெய்வருத்தக் கூலி தரும்"
— திருக்குறள்