SolarWinds Experts in Germany

• Design and build of a fully isolated AWS offline environment with no outbound internet access for running a browser-based business application
• Design and implementation of a proxy and response service that terminates all external application calls inside the VPC and serves them from locally stored content; identification of the actual communication needs through measurement-based DNS query logging
• Creation of architecture designs and decision papers including a comparison of options (Application Load Balancer with Lambda and S3, reverse proxy on EC2, private API Gateway) assessed by operational effort, cost, and availability
• Transfer of the solution and operations documentation previously available only for Azure to an AWS target architecture, including reassignment of all services and operational processes
• Automated rollout as Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, CloudFormation) with CI deployment via GitHub Actions, plus setup of private DNS zones and an internal certificate chain for operation without internet access
• Creation of architecture, deployment, and operations documentation and handover to the customer
• Build-up of a private cloud platform on OpenStack at provider TelemaxX with Terraform, including FortiGate HA clusters, FortiManager, and Kubernetes
• Introduction of Policy as Code (Open Policy Agent, Conftest) as well as development of MCP servers (Model Context Protocol) to connect AI assistants to operations and project tools

Successes:

• Made the business application fully operable without internet access for the first time; the cause of the loading error was narrowed down systematically to missing CORS headers after the likely certificate issue was ruled out
• Fully transferred an existing Azure concept to AWS and replaced the manually created environment with a reproducible, CI-based rollout

Technology stack: AWS (VPC, Application Load Balancer, Lambda, S3, Route 53 private hosted zones and Resolver query logging, IAM, CloudWatch, EC2, CloudFormation), Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, CloudFormation, Remote State), CI/CD (GitHub Actions with OIDC, Azure DevOps Pipelines), OpenStack, FortiGate, FortiManager, Kubernetes, Policy as Code (Open Policy Agent, Conftest), offline and air-gap architectures, PKI & certificates (internal CA, TLS, CRL/OCSP), DNS, network segmentation, Linux, Windows Server, Python, Bash, PowerShell, YAML, JSON, architecture design & decision papers, documentation (Confluence, Markdown), Generative & Agentic AI (Model Context Protocol, Agentic AI Coding Tools)

• Designed and specified the technical network integration of a new business critical application system (MUREX) in the capital market area in a complex interface and outsourcing environment.

• Created component specifications, catalog of measures and implementation plan.

• Ensured proper integration of developed results in accordance with the bank’s framework: IT compliance, IT security, change and release management.

• Selected and integrated a new service provider for the bank; moved critical bank applications to the provider.

• Designed, implemented and supported the new Cisco network and Fortinet security setup at the service provider data center.

• Acted as technical interface between bank, service providers and consulting partners.

• Supported and further developed the network and security infrastructure (clients, servers, networks); performed error analysis and implemented solutions within agreed service levels.

• Analyzed and diagnosed all security and network failures, glitches and malfunctions.

• Initiated continuous enhancements to guarantee efficient resource utilization and acceptable response times to users.

• Provided network support in financial service organization and operational change preparation on production banking network infrastructure for both large and small projects within strict change management discipline.

• Designed, defined, tested, governed and improved engineering standards.

• Performed role of network architect for medium-large projects involving team resources.

• Designed a network management strategy focused on NetDevOps principles and model-driven telemetry using YANG data models
• Conducted NETCONF/YANG workshops for L2VPN/L3VPN services over SRv6
• Automated configuration deployment in the testing environment with Ansible
• Developed end-to-end service measurement concepts with IPSLA and the Telegraf-Prometheus-Grafana stack
• Created the dual-stack architecture design (router + switch + firewall) including a detailed test plan; planned, executed, and documented acceptance tests for the management network
• Performed BSI IT baseline protection checks according to the IT-Grundschutz catalog (needs assessment, modeling, risk analysis, deriving measures)
• Protocols: SRv6, IPv6, MPLS, BGP, ISIS, OSPF, NETCONF/YANG, model-driven telemetry, IPSLA
• Systems: Cisco Crosswork Network Controller, SolarWinds Orion, Grafana, InfluxDB, Telegraf, Ansible, Git
• Components: Cisco NCS router series, Cisco Catalyst switch series, Cisco Firepower firewall series

• Responsible project manager for complex international infrastructure projects
• Coordinator and decision-maker for IT architects in network infrastructure and software with over 100 000 users
• Holistic project management
• Launch and implementation of initiatives
• Project management of international infrastructure projects with C-level reporting
• Leadership and coordination of IT architects
• Technical project management for merger and cloud transformation
• Execution of international software and hardware rollouts
• Implementation of IT security projects and compliance
• Working with key technologies (e.g. 5G/6G standard)
• Management of complex defense and aerospace projects (e.g. Ariane 6, Eurodrone)
• Establishment of the healthcare and life sciences business unit
• Creation and management of internal employee training

• Provided expert level consulting for lifecycle, upgrades and refresh activities
• Used Remedy for effort recording and billing to customers
• Used ServiceNow for service management and workflow
• Used Jira for project management with agile/Scrum methods
• Used Confluence for documentation
• Worked with customer-specific software tools
• Worked with customer-provided and secured hardware suitable for IT security operations infrastructure setup for customers
• Built firewall rule sets and handed over to service owner and delivery teams
• Environment: Cisco ASA, Cisco Firepower, CSM, Cisco AnyConnect, Cisco ISE, Check Point VSX and gateways

• Planning, concept design, re-design
• Pre-sales support
• Project support according to PRINCE2
• Setup of a CMDB
• Implementation of communication processes

• Implementation of specified DevOps solutions to automate infrastructure (Terraform, Bicep, CloudFormation, Ansible) on-premises datacenter (Ovirt, Proxmox, Ceph Cluster, MinIO) and private cloud.
• Administration, configuration and implementation of CI/CD DevOps pipelines (GitLab, GitFlow) to support development process (Artifactory, Prometheus, Istio, service mesh, Helm Chart, OpenShift (Red Hat Enterprise) / Kubernetes cluster), Red Hat Satellite.
• Administration, setup, monitoring and patching of Linux infrastructure based on Red Hat Enterprise for Dev, Test and QA.
• Use of Scrum and Kanban methods.
• Administration, configuration and implementation of security standards for deploying on Dev, Test, QA and Prod stages of the new ePA applications.
• Development of new plugins and add-ons needed on current infrastructure.
• Database support.
• Data analytics support (Python, Spark, Pandas, Power BI, Splunk Enterprise).
• Implementation of best practices for DevSecOps and BizDevOps using GitOps (ArgoCD), Streamlit framework, Semaphore Ansible UI.
• Configuration and testing of iperf, uperf, sysbench using benchmark-operator for external source data and IoT/MDM devices, creating reports via ELK / OpenSearch.
• Building a new Databricks platform to collect and analyze big data from different sources and IoT devices into Hadoop framework (Python, Pandas, PySpark, Power BI, Apache Airflow).
• Building backend data aggregation and processing to automate configuration deployment between different OpenShift clusters and big data framework (Python, Pandas, PySpark, Apache Spark, PostgreSQL, Django 2, Ansible Automation, Jira JSM).
• Building a new ML pipeline platform using Kubeflow, TensorFlow, KServe.
• Data extraction, transformation and loading from different data sources including structured and unstructured data to analytic DWH / big data cluster using Python, Pandas, Polars, Power BI, Django backend and PostgreSQL.
• Setup of new DevOps Test and QA HashiCorp Vault cluster for PKI and IAM.
• Configuration and testing of automated patching based on CVSS score, SIEM-integrated CVEs.
• Use of Nexpose and InsightVM to scan vulnerability events in network, host, container and application.
• Design and implementation of secure and scalable AWS architectures including VPC, EC2, S3, RDS and Route53 and similar setups on Azure and GCP.
• Automated system provisioning and deployment using CloudFormation templates.
• Configuration of IAM roles, policies and permissions to ensure secure access control.
• Patch management, backup automation and disaster recovery setup on AWS infrastructure.
• Monitoring and optimization of system performance using AWS CloudWatch and AWS Trusted Advisor.
• Support of VMware services (vSphere, Aria, Horizon) and the virtual desktop environment.
• Development and maintenance of CI/CD pipelines using Jenkins, GitLab CI/CD and AWS CodePipeline with interface to Nutanix.
• Configuration of AWS CloudWatch to monitor application performance and system events.
• Planning and execution of migration of on-premises applications to AWS cloud platforms.
• Deployment of containerized applications using Docker and Kubernetes in AWS environments.
• Deployment of internal software packages between availability zones using AWS CodeDeploy.
• Building and deploying ML models using Scikit-learn, XGBoost and Spark MLlib including hyperparameter tuning, model evaluation and production deployment.