Birkan Kolcu

At Ambient, I was part of the cloud engineering team responsible for building and maintaining cloud infrastructure for production workloads, as well as hosting our internal tooling used by our company. On a day-to-day basis, I assisted our software developers in overcoming their daily CI/CD and Cloud-related problems, in addition to maintaining our infrastructure. From time to time, I provided consultation for cloud infrastructures to external companies as part of our cloud engineering team. Highlights for my current role are as follows:

• Created and maintained high-quality infrastructure-as-code templates for speeding up infrastructure deployments. Deployed and maintained many production systems.

• Consistently received extremely positive reviews from our Developers on providing assistance for our daily support work.

• Proactively improved and documented processes on internal billing, cost optimization, and further improved monitoring systems for better cost visibility.

• Launched DevOps Community of Practice for hands-on cloud learning labs initiatives for developers; developers consistently filled out limited seats for the workshops.

I recently founded CognitaStack in a sole proprietorship form, in addition to working as a Cloud Engineer at Ambient. I am providing professional Cloud Engineering workshop training to German companies under the infrasprint.com brand. I also have a software product on the Steam platform called sentinelsignal.com, aiming to assist PC gamers in managing their gaming time to balance their gaming passion with life's priorities.

At Bestcloudforme, I am part of an agile team serving large enterprises to assist with their DevOps workflows, as well as designing and building cloud-native solutions from the ground up for production environments. Some of the highlights for my current position are as follows:

• Taking responsibility for assisting customers with their daily CI/CD and AWS-related problems, as well as implementing newly requested features on AWS and on-premise environments.

• During my regular implementation/troubleshooting tasks, I spotted a handful of cost optimization opportunities in the AWS environment, such as EC2 compute optimizations, unused CloudWatch dashboards, and EFS lifecycle misconfigurations, that sum up to +$4000/month savings on AWS bills for our customer.

• Helped my team acquire cutting-edge know-how for a cloud-native CI/CD solution named Tekton and build production-grade custom Tekton CI/CD pipelines on k8s.

• Took responsibility for building end-to-end AI solutions on AWS and achieved a proof-of-concept anomaly detection from IoT sensors.

• Continuously spotted and reported technical debt within systems, as well as helped establish documentation for tracking technical debts within our team.

DevOps / Kubernetes / Tekton Pipelines / AWS / Jenkins / Amazon SageMaker-Forecast-Quicksight / Python / ECS / EKS / ECR / AWS Lambda / Serverless / Elasticsearch / AWS Cost Optimization