$ whoami _

Gulshad Ansari

DevOps, Cloud & Big Data Architect

10+ years turning infrastructure into product. I design multi-cloud platforms across AWSGCPAzure — standardized on Infrastructure as Code, delivered through GitOps, secured with Vault, and increasingly accelerated with AI-augmented tooling.

10+
yrs in infrastructure
06
yrs as cloud architect
03
hyperscalers
01
obsession: automate everything
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About

I started my career deep inside the machine room — racking Hadoop clusters, tuning HDFS, and standing up secure, highly-available data platforms on-prem and in early AWS/GCP deployments. That decade of Linux, distributed systems, and production-firefighting experience is the foundation everything since has been built on.

Since 2020 I've operated as a DevOps, Cloud & Big Data Architect, designing multi-cloud strategy across AWS, GCP and Azure; standardizing Infrastructure as Code with Terraform and Terragrunt; and building the CI/CD, Kubernetes and GitOps platforms that let product teams ship safely without thinking about the plumbing underneath. Secrets management, platform engineering, large-scale data architecture, and — more recently — weaving LLM/AI tooling into the DevOps lifecycle round out where my attention lives today.

I care about systems that are boring in production: reproducible, observable, and secure by default — so the interesting problems get the attention instead.

  • 3Clouds architected — AWS · GCP · Azure
  • 6Years leading DevOps, Cloud & Big Data architecture
  • 10+Years in infrastructure & distributed systems
  • 0Standing secrets — Vault-first, dynamic credentials
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Skills

Cloud

AWSGoogle Cloud (GCP)Microsoft Azure Multi-Cloud StrategyLanding ZonesFinOps / Cost Optimization

Infrastructure as Code

TerraformTerragruntAnsible CloudFormationModule GovernancePolicy as Code

CI/CD

JenkinsAzure DevOpsGit GitHub ActionsPipeline as CodeShell / Python

Containers & GitOps

KubernetesHelmDocker ArgoCDGitOpsOpenShift

Secrets & Security

HashiCorp VaultOpenBaoIAM & RBAC Design Kerberos / ADRanger & KnoxTLS / Zero-Trust

AI / LLM Tooling

LLM-Assisted IaCAI Code ReviewChatOps Automation Claude / Copilot WorkflowsPrompt-Driven Runbooks

Big Data — Legacy Foundation

HadoopCloudera / HortonworksHDFS · YARN · Hive · HBase Kafka · NiFiZookeeper · OozieLinux / Unix Admin

Core proficiency

Terraform / IaC95%
Kubernetes & GitOps90%
AWS / GCP / Azure92%
CI/CD Platform Design88%
Secrets Management (Vault)85%
Big Data / Hadoop Ecosystem80%
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Experience

  1. 2020 — Present current

    DevOps, Cloud & Big Data Architect

    o9 Solutions, Inc

    • Architected multi-cloud infrastructure strategy across AWS, GCP and Azure, standardizing landing zones, networking and IAM guardrails across dozens of accounts and subscriptions.
    • Defined a company-wide Infrastructure as Code standard on Terraform and Terragrunt, replacing ad-hoc provisioning with reusable, versioned modules and cutting environment turnaround from days to hours.
    • Built and scaled CI/CD platforms on Jenkins and Azure DevOps with pipeline-as-code, automated test gates and progressive delivery, adopted across engineering teams.
    • Led migration of legacy VM workloads to Kubernetes, designing multi-cluster architecture with Helm packaging standards and GitOps delivery through ArgoCD.
    • Modernized large-scale Big Data platforms onto cloud-native infrastructure, re-architecting Hadoop/Hive workloads onto managed cloud data services with Terraform-driven provisioning and Kubernetes-based processing.
    • Implemented centralized secrets management with HashiCorp Vault — dynamic credentials, automated rotation, zero standing secrets in pipelines — and piloted OpenBao as an open-source alternative.
    • Drove platform engineering initiatives (self-service provisioning, golden paths, internal developer platform) to reduce cognitive load on product teams and accelerate time-to-production.
    • Integrated LLM/AI tooling into the DevOps toolchain — AI-assisted Terraform authoring, automated pipeline failure triage and ChatOps runbooks — to reduce MTTR and manual toil.
    • Partnered with security and architecture review boards on cloud governance, FinOps practices and cross-cloud DR/BCP strategy.
  2. Apr 2018 — 2020

    DevOps Architect — Big Data Solutions

    o9 Solutions, Inc

    • Devised big-data solution architecture for enterprise customers, automating Hadoop deployments across Azure, AWS and GCP with Ansible, Jenkins and Azure DevOps.
    • Analyzed complex distributed production deployments and delivered performance optimization recommendations to customer engineering teams.
    • Authored architecture documentation and technical runbooks; managed and monitored production environments end-to-end.
  3. Jan 2018 — Apr 2021

    Sr. Customer Operations Engineer

    Hortonworks / Cloudera, Inc

    • Subject-matter expert for security components across HDP/CDH/CDP stacks, resolving critical production issues for enterprise customers.
    • Partnered with product engineering to identify and fix platform bugs, improving the CDP upgrade experience.
    • Mentored L1/L2 support engineers, designed training modules and led knowledge-sharing sessions on security, Docker and Kubernetes.
  4. Jan 2017 — Jul 2018

    Technical Consultant — Hadoop, Linux & Cloud

    Teradata India Pvt. Ltd

    • Installed, configured and benchmarked HDP clusters; designed secure cluster architecture with Kerberos, Ranger, Knox and TLS.
    • Led data migration and DR strategy between clusters, including WANdisco Fusion administration and consistency checks.
    • Implemented HA for NameNode, Resource Manager and HiveServer2 to remove single points of failure.
  5. 2011 — 2017

    Early Career — Foundation in Big Data & Linux

    Impetus Technologies · Capita India · Tech Mahindra

    • Impetus Technologies (2016–2017) — Deployed and supported BI tooling on customer Hadoop environments, managed cluster security and AD/SSO integration.
    • Capita India (2012–2015) — Installed, configured and administered Hadoop clusters; automated operations with shell scripting; handled RDBMS ↔ HDFS data movement via Sqoop and Flume.
    • Tech Mahindra (2011–2012) — Automated enterprise reporting workflows using VBA and SQL.
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Certifications & Education

HDP Certified Administrator (HDPCA)

Hortonworks

Hadoop Fundamentals

Big Data University

CLOUDU Certification

Rackspace

🎓

M.C.A — Master of Computer Applications

Pune University

🎓

B.Sc — Bachelor of Science

Pune University

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Contact

Building or rethinking cloud platform architecture? I'm open to conversations about multi-cloud strategy, platform engineering, and DevOps transformation.

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