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Mahin Raza
Open to DevOps, Cloud & Platform Engineering roles
Mahin Raza
// DevOps & Cloud Engineer

Hi, I’m Mahin Raza

Cloud Infrastructure, Kubernetes & Site Reliability

I design, automate, and operate cloud-native infrastructure with a focus on reliability, clean Infrastructure as Code, container orchestration, and high-signal observability. Beyond day-to-day infrastructure work, I document real-world troubleshooting notes, SLO design patterns, and architecture deep dives on my engineering blog.

View Projects Engineering Blog Contact Me
mahin@cloud-node:~/portfolio
Run:
mahin@cloud-node:~$ cat whoami.yaml 
apiVersion: engineer.mahinraza.online/v1
kind: CloudDevOpsProfile
metadata:
  name: Mahin Raza (@Mahin556)
  role: DevOps & Cloud Engineer
spec:
  platforms: [AWS, GCP, Linux, Kubernetes, Docker]
  automation: [Terraform, GitHub Actions, Helm, Bash, Python, Go]
  reliability: [Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, SLOs]
  blog: https://blog.mahinraza.online
status:
  ready: true  # Type 'help' or click a command above
Core Focus
Cloud, K8s & SRE
AWS, GCP, Linux & Containers
Provisioning
100% Declarative
Terraform, Helm & GitOps workflows
Observability
SLO-Driven
Prometheus, OTel & Burn-Rate Alerts
Engineering Notes
Public Runbooks
Deep dives at blog.mahinraza.online
// What I Do

Core Engineering Domains

Practical infrastructure engineering across cloud provisioning, Kubernetes operations, and SLO-backed observability.

01 // CLOUD & IAC

Cloud Architecture & Infrastructure as Code

Provisioning reproducible, version-controlled cloud environments across AWS and GCP with modular Infrastructure as Code, least-privilege IAM, and isolated failure domains.

  • Modular Terraform / OpenTofu state management with automated plan validation in pull requests
  • Multi-AZ VPC networking, private subnets, NAT routing, and security group segmentation
  • Immutable VM and container base images with Vagrant, Docker, and cloud-init automation
AWS Google Cloud Terraform Cloudflare Vagrant IAM
02 // CONTAINERS & K8S

Kubernetes & Container Orchestration

Packaging applications into minimal, hardened containers and operating resilient Kubernetes workloads with safe rollouts, resource governance, and autoscaling.

  • Multi-stage Docker builds, distroless/non-root runtime images, and vulnerability scanning
  • Kubernetes deployments with tuned readiness/startup probes, PodDisruptionBudgets, and HPA
  • Declarative cluster add-ons, ingress routing, TLS lifecycle management, and Helm packaging
Kubernetes Docker Helm Argo CD Ingress NGINX Containerd
03 // OBSERVABILITY & SRE

Observability, SLOs & Incident Response

Building telemetry pipelines that page on real customer impact and deadline risk rather than noisy host spikes—preserving regional visibility and trace context.

  • Multi-window SLO burn-rate alerting and queue-deadline PromQL rules in Prometheus
  • End-to-end distributed tracing instrumentation and sampling policies with OpenTelemetry
  • Structured incident command runbooks, regional SLI isolation, and blameless postmortems
Prometheus Grafana OpenTelemetry PromQL Alertmanager SLOs
04 // CI/CD & LINUX

CI/CD Pipelines, Linux & Systems Automation

Eliminating repetitive operational toil through automated build/release pipelines, custom CLI scripts, and deep Linux systems & networking troubleshooting.

  • GitHub Actions workflows for automated testing, static validation, security checks, and edge deploys
  • Linux administration, systemd service hardening, process/socket diagnostics, and shell tooling
  • Custom engineering automation in Python, Bash, Go, and TypeScript
Linux GitHub Actions Bash Python Go Networking
// Toolchain

Tech Stack & Platforms

29 tools & technologies
AWS (EC2, VPC, S3, IAM, SQS, EKS)
Cloud Infrastructure
Google Cloud (GCP)
Cloud Platform
Terraform / OpenTofu
Infrastructure as Code
Cloudflare Pages & DNS / Edge
Edge & CDN
Vagrant
Reproducible Lab VMs
Ansible
Configuration Management
Kubernetes
Container Orchestration
Docker & Docker Compose
Containerization
Helm
K8s Package Management
Argo CD
GitOps Continuous Delivery
HPA & Workload Autoscaling
Elasticity & Scaling
Prometheus & PromQL
Metrics & Alerting
Grafana
Dashboards & Visualization
OpenTelemetry (OTel)
Distributed Tracing
SLIs, SLOs & Error Budgets
Reliability Engineering
Alertmanager & Incident Command
On-Call & Response
GitHub Actions
CI/CD Pipelines
Git & Trunk / PR Workflows
Version Control
Container Registry & Signing
Artifact Supply Chain
Static & Policy Validation
Shift-Left Checks
Linux (Ubuntu, Debian, RHEL)
OS Internals & Ops
TCP/IP, DNS, HTTP/TLS & NGINX
Traffic & Reverse Proxy
SSH, UFW / iptables & Hardening
Host Security
IAM Least-Privilege & Secrets
Access Control
Bash / POSIX Shell
Systems Scripting
Python
Automation & Tooling
Go (Golang)
Cloud-Native CLI / Tooling
YAML / JSON / HCL
Declarative Configs
TypeScript
Web & Build Automation
// Hands-On Systems

Featured Projects & Blueprints

Browse all 6 projects →
Platform & Automation Production

Zero-Database Engineering Blog & GitOps Syndication Pipeline

Architected a Git-driven engineering publication platform (blog.mahinraza.online) with zero runtime database dependencies. Markdown commits trigger CI validation, automated OpenGraph social card generation, client-side search indexing, and opt-in cross-posting to DEV and Hashnode with canonical SEO protection.

// Key Engineering Details
  • Automated Markdown & frontmatter linter (validate-blogs.ts) enforcing metadata, code fence languages, and asset integrity in GitHub Actions
  • Idempotent DEV.to and Hashnode API publishers that rewrite relative asset paths to canonical edge URLs
  • Sub-50ms edge delivery on Cloudflare Pages with immutable asset caching and strict security headers
Astro TypeScript GitHub Actions Cloudflare Pages Tailwind CSS REST / GraphQL APIs
Live Platform
Source
Observability & SRE Blueprint

Multi-Region SLO, Seasonal Baseline & Queue-Age Alerting Suite

Designed practical Prometheus recording rules and alerting contracts for distributed queues and multi-region services—replacing naive depth or global-average thresholds with deadline-age budgets, regional failure-domain SLIs, and explicit missing-telemetry detection.

// Key Engineering Details
  • Queue backlog alerting tied to oldest-eligible message age, consumer readiness, and stalled-progress detection
  • Per-region SLI ratios with absent-metric heartbeats so regional blackholes never hide behind healthy global traffic
  • Seasonal traffic anomaly diagnostics decoupled from customer-facing SLO burn-rate pages
Prometheus PromQL Alertmanager Grafana Amazon SQS SRE
Architecture Deep Dive
Observability & SRE Blueprint

OpenTelemetry Distributed Tracing & Context Propagation Lab

Built hands-on Python and microservice tracing experiments demonstrating how W3C traceparent headers propagate across service boundaries, why extracted remote contexts report isRecording=false, and how ParentBased samplers govern downstream span recording.

// Key Engineering Details
  • End-to-end W3C TraceContext extraction and injection across HTTP service boundaries
  • Deterministic verification of ParentBased(root=TraceIdRatioBased) sampling behavior
  • Clear separation of context propagation diagnostics from local span recording overhead
OpenTelemetry Python Distributed Tracing W3C TraceContext Docker
Architecture Deep Dive
Kubernetes & Cloud Blueprint

Cloud-Native Kubernetes & GitOps Delivery Environment

Reference Kubernetes deployment workflow combining hardened multi-stage container builds, GitHub Actions CI verification, Helm chart templating, health probes, and declarative rollouts with resource requests/limits and horizontal pod autoscaling.

// Key Engineering Details
  • Non-root multi-stage Dockerfiles with minimal attack surface and deterministic layer caching
  • Startup, readiness, and liveness probe separation to prevent premature pod restarts under cold start
  • Declarative namespaces, network policies, and HPA scaling policies managed entirely through Git
Kubernetes Docker Helm GitHub Actions Linux YAML
Source
// How I Build & Operate

Delivery Pipeline & Reliability Tenets

GitOps · Zero-Downtime · Symptom-Based Alerting
STAGE 01

Plan & IaC Review

$ terraform plan -out=tfplan && tflint

Declarative network, IAM, and cluster changes peer-reviewed in Git before touching cloud APIs.

  • ✓ State drift detection
  • ✓ Least-privilege IAM diff
  • ✓ Module version pinning
STAGE 02

CI Build & Policy Gate

$ docker buildx build --target=runtime .

Automated GitHub Actions pipelines run tests, linters, and build minimal non-root container artifacts.

  • ✓ Multi-stage distroless build
  • ✓ Config & schema validation
  • ✓ Immutable SHA tagging
STAGE 03

Progressive K8s Rollout

$ kubectl rollout status deploy/api -n prod

Zero-downtime deployments guarded by startup/readiness probes, resource quotas, and disruption budgets.

  • ✓ Startup & readiness gates
  • ✓ Pod anti-affinity across AZs
  • ✓ Automated rollback on failure
STAGE 04

SLOs & Telemetry Loop

$ promtool check rules alerts/slo_burn.yml

OpenTelemetry traces and Prometheus regional SLIs continuously verify user experience after release.

  • ✓ Per-region SLI boundaries
  • ✓ Burn-rate & deadline alerts
  • ✓ Actionable incident runbooks
observability.symptom_based = true

Alert on Customer Impact, Not Raw Noise

CPU spikes and batch queue bursts are context, not automatically incidents. Page on SLO burn rates, deadline risk, and stalled progress.

sli.aggregation != "global_only"

Preserve Failure-Domain Boundaries

Global averages conceal single-AZ or low-volume regional blackholes. Track health per independent failure domain with missing-series guards.

infra.source_of_truth = "git"

Everything Reproducible from Git

Servers, cluster manifests, alert rules, and documentation belong in version control so environments can be rebuilt deterministically.

ops.manual_steps -> 0

Automate Repetitive Operational Toil

If a task has to be executed manually more than twice, turn it into an idempotent script, CI workflow, or self-validating tool.

// Engineering Dispatches

Latest from the Blog

Read all articles at blog.mahinraza.online
// Connect

Let’s build reliable cloud & platform infrastructure together.

Have an opportunity in DevOps, Cloud Engineering, Kubernetes, or Site Reliability—or want to discuss an infrastructure challenge or article? Reach out directly via email or GitHub.

Email Mahin
// Endpoints
GitHub @Mahin556 ↗ Engineering Blog blog.mahinraza.online ↗ Email mahinraza556@gmail.com ↗ RSS Feed /rss.xml ↗