Azure Application Gateway Experts in Germany

• Short description: Leading a group-wide project to establish standardized cloud governance for Microsoft Azure, including policies, security and compliance controls, automation, and cost and operations management while preserving the autonomy of decentralized business units within regulatory frameworks.

• Tasks and activities:

• Overall responsibility for designing, building, and implementing a company-wide cloud governance structure (Azure), including target picture, roadmap, and operating model.

• Managing internal and external stakeholders (C-level, IT, Security, Compliance, Cloud Architecture, DevOps), including decision and escalation management.

• Planning and facilitating workshops on cloud strategy, governance principles, and the design of areas such as identity, connectivity, and platform management.

• Defining, implementing, and rolling out cloud policies (Azure Policy / custom policies), security standards, and compliance requirements (including GDPR, ISO 27001, BSI C5).

• Building a cloud governance framework based on the Azure Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF), including landing zone and guardrail concepts.

• Introducing automation solutions for governance, security, and cost control (policy/control automation, IaC, CI/CD-based control mechanisms).

• Implementing cloud security and compliance monitoring mechanisms as well as continuous improvement processes.

• Establishing and operationalizing FinOps in an enterprise environment (central and decentralized FinOps teams), including cost management strategies, reporting, and guardrails.

• Integrating governance policies into DevOps processes (e.g. CI/CD principles for security and compliance checks, GitLab Runner concept in spokes, GitLab CI/CD for CAF landing zones).

• Implementing access concepts including RBAC design and breaking-glass mechanisms (emergency access) as well as certificate automation (ACME / step-ca).

• Achievements:

• Created a unified, auditable governance and control set for Azure (policies, standards, compliance mapping) and thus laid the foundation for scalable cloud use in a regulated environment.

• Established repeatable automation for governance, security, and cost control (IaC + CI/CD), reducing manual effort and implementation risk.

• Improved operational and decision-making capability across central and decentralized units (clearer roles, responsibilities, escalation paths, balance between autonomy and group requirements).

• Significantly increased workload compliance during lift-and-shift migrations.

• Technologies used:

• Microsoft Azure Policy, custom policies.

• Terraform, OpenTofu, Terragrunt.

• step-ca (ACME).

• Entra ID.

• Azure Firewall.

• Azure Networking, hub-and-spoke architecture.

• Azure vWAN (evaluation).

• Azure Front Door, Azure Application Gateway.

• Azure ExpressRoute.

• Azure Key Vault.

• NetBox.

• GitLab (on-premises).

• Infrastructure, concepts used:

• Cloud shared responsibility model.

• Hub-and-spoke connectivity / central shared services (from hub-spoke context).

• Central governance with decentralized delivery (business unit autonomy with guardrails).

• Methods used:

• Scrum.

• Stakeholder management (C-level to engineering).

• Cloud governance, Azure Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF).

• DevOps, CI/CD.

• Cost and FinOps approaches: tagging/chargeback models, budget/alert concepts, reserved instances/savings plans vs. on-demand scenarios, sensitivity analyses.

• RBAC, breaking-glass concepts.

• ACME / certificate automation.

• GitLab Runner concept in spokes, GitLab CI/CD pipelines for CAF landing zones.

• In this role, I was responsible as Lead Software Engineer for automating various meat production lines.
• My focus was on developing highly available (High Availability) systems using C/C++.
• I also implemented and supported container orchestration with Kubernetes to ensure smooth and scalable production operations.

OpsWorker turns Kubernetes alerts into root-cause analyses, on top of the monitoring a team already runs. I lead the technical side: the agent architecture, the AWS infrastructure it runs on (fully inside EU regions), and the engineering decisions behind it, read-only in the cluster by default, human in the loop for judgment. The stack underneath: Amazon Bedrock and Bedrock AgentCore, agents built with the Strands Agents SDK, the Claude and OpenAI APIs, and the Kubernetes API.

• As part of the project, I was responsible for operating a Citrix farm for 600 users, including optimizing the user experience and ensuring high availability.

• I managed and optimized the entire application landscape of a major customer, evaluated and implemented application updates, and ensured the compatibility and security of the software in use.

• I managed user accounts, implemented security policies, and monitored system performance.

• I administered Azure Entra ID to control identities and access rights, implemented security policies, and synchronized on-premises directories with the cloud.

• I implemented and managed Microsoft Intune for central management of client devices, including the configuration and management of BitLocker for disk encryption.

• I managed file servers and NTFS permissions to ensure secure and efficient data access management.

• I handled change requests and last-level support tickets efficiently to solve complex system issues and improve user satisfaction.

• I supported and advised the customer team on various topics and projects, identified areas for improvement, and implemented best practices.

Technologies used:

• Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop
• Microsoft Windows Server 2012R2 and 2022
• Exchange 2016 and Exchange Online
• Entra ID (Azure AD)
• Entra ID Connect
• BitLocker
• PowerShell scripting
• Microsoft Intune
• LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol)
• DNS services (Domain Name System)
• Active Directory Certificate Services (AD CS)

• Further development and partial new development of a distributed cloud application for providing data in energy trading
• Independent implementation of the infrastructure (IaC)
• Creation of automated CI/CD pipelines, containers, REST APIs, and Lambdas
• Continuous cost and performance optimization
• Collaboration in an international Scrum team and with experts in energy trading
• Technologies: C#/ASP.NET Core; EF Core; PostgreSQL; Terraform/AWS CloudFormation; HTTP; REST/Web API; Swagger/OpenAPI; Azure DevOps; Rider; VS Code; git; Docker; AWS (S3, EC2, Fargate, Lambda, Step Functions, Secrets Manager, VPCs, ALB/NLB, RDS, Cloudwatch, AWS CLI, Amazon MQ); Redis; OAuth; OpenID Connect
• Languages: C#; TypeScript; HCL; Docker; Bash; PowerShell; YML; JSON

• Cloud Computing Fundamentals & Architecture: Expertise in core cloud concepts, including the three main Service Models (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS) and diverse Deployment Models (Public, Private, Hybrid, Multi-cloud).
• Modern Application Deployment Strategies (GCP Focus): Instruction on the GCP Application Hosting Spectrum, covering Virtual Machines, Containers (Kubernetes and Cloud Run), Platform as a Service (App Engine), and Serverless Computing (Functions as a Service - FaaS).
• Data Management & Big Data Analytics: Comprehensive coverage of Cloud Storage options (Object, Block, File) and Database solutions, including Relational (Cloud SQL), NoSQL (Firestore, BigTable, Memorystore), and serverless enterprise data warehousing (BigQuery).
• DevOps and Infrastructure Automation: Skills in DevOps principles, including Continuous Integration (CI), Continuous Delivery (CD), Infrastructure as Code (IaC) using tools like Terraform, and implementing effective Monitoring and Logging for system observability.
• Emerging Technologies & Responsible Cloud Use: Focus on crucial topics like Cloud and IoT Security, Identity and Access Management (IAM), data privacy, and the ethical considerations of cloud and massive data collection.

• Automatic report generation based on log data from the Senstar surveillance camera software, tracking access times of different camera systems
• Gathering requirements and translating them into a suitable technical solution
• Implementing Python scripts to read, process, and convert Senstar log data into PDF reports
• Reading configuration files to control the scripts
• Packaging the Python scripts and all dependencies into an executable .cmd for offline installation on Windows Server
• Providing a --help parameter to list and explain the script options
• Creating documentation for installing, configuring, and running the scripts
• Technical environment: Python 3, SQL, Senstar, Windows Server, Python setuptools, fpdf

• Architecting and enhancing the DevOps infrastructure in a regulated environment
• Migration, planning, and development from a monolith to microservices (ASP.NET Core)
• Building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines (GitLab, Jenkins) to support agile development
• Managing artifact repositories with JFrog Artifactory and security scans via Xray
• Migrating and integrating source code repositories (SVN → GitLab)
• Operating and configuring a container platform with OpenShift
• Automating deployments with Ansible, Helm, and the Ansible Automation Platform
• Implementing monitoring and alerting solutions with Prometheus
• Collaborating closely with the frontend development team to optimize build, test, and release processes
• Supporting the establishment of secure and scalable infrastructure processes (Secure SDLC)
• Documenting and sharing knowledge within the team
• Leading refinements and designing the backend architecture

• Fullstack development based on Next.js and TypeScript
• Development and optimization of geospatial database queries for PostgreSQL/PostGIS
• Visualization of geospatial data using Mapbox
• Design and execution of load tests and performance optimizations
• Code reviews and documentation tasks
• Technologies: JavaScript, TypeScript, Next.js, React, Zod, tRPC, Storybooks, PostgreSQL/PostGIS, MicroORM, Knex, Material UI, Mapbox, BullMQ, Jest, Playwright, Artillery.io, K6, Sentry, Figma, GitLab, Grafana, GTFS

• Migrated existing ASP.NET microservices to ASP.NET Core
• Converted legacy logging and dependency injection to Microsoft.Extensions
• Integrated with Azure services
• Implemented unit tests
• Updated Azure DevOps pipelines
• Technologies: C#, .NET Core, ASP.NET Core, Git, Azure Application Services, Application Gateway, Functions, SQL Database, Application Insights, Storage, Service Bus, Key Vault, API Management, ARM templates, Azure DevOps