/ selected work

Case studies

Each one follows the same arc — the problem, the constraints I worked under, the architecture I chose, the trade-offs I accepted, and what actually changed. No polish over substance.

01Cutting the Cloud Bill 58% Without Cutting Reliability

Right-sizing and consolidating GCP workloads — moving low-traffic services off managed Kubernetes onto VMs behind Caddy/Traefik and Cloudflare — for a 58% infrastructure cost reduction.

Cost OptimizationGCPKubernetesCaddy
02Reusable GitLab CI Templates: 15 → 4 Minute Pipelines

Replacing copy-pasted pipelines with versioned, reusable GitLab CI templates — parallelized and layer-cached — cutting pipeline time ~60% (15 → 4 min) and standardizing builds across repos.

CI/CDGitLab CIGoReact/Next.js
03Centralizing Secrets: Repo Settings → Vault → OpenBao

Moving secrets out of GitLab repo settings into HashiCorp Vault (KV-v2), then to OpenBao after the licensing change — keeping the API contract stable so apps and pipelines needed no rewrite.

SecretsOpenBaoHashiCorp VaultSecurity
04A Self-Hosted Observability Stack on One GCP VM

Standing up Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, and Sentry on a single GCP VM to turn scattered, siloed telemetry into one place to see metrics, logs, and errors — with tracing (OpenTelemetry/Jaeger) as the next step.

ObservabilityPrometheusGrafanaLoki