Prior to working at this company, I earned four AWS certifications and participated in several projects that required AWS knowledge, but nothing compared to what I achieved during my time here.
You might be wondering how I ended up collaborating on architecture and infrastructure, given that I was originally hired as a backend engineer. The truth is, I was extremely lucky. There were managerial changes within the company, and a few months after I started, a new CTO joined the team. We were also a pretty small team and always needed an extra pair of hands.
During a 1-on-1 with the CTO, we discussed hiring someone to help us with DevOps. I’m glad I had the courage to ask if I could assist with some related tasks. At that point, he didn’t know what I was capable of, but he took a chance and gave me the opportunity to work on something.
I remember initially offering to migrate our main application from EC2 servers to containers, as I had worked on dockerizing the app during my first months. Deploying our EC2 servers was a mess, and moving to containers would also improve scalability and availability. So, I got the green light and started working on it.
I’m really grateful that the CTO trusted me with the task of working on architecture and infrastructure. This was a real game-changer for my professional career. Below, you’ll find a list of contributions I made to the company in different areas like Observability, Cost Savings, Security, and DevOps, among others. They are not listed in any particular order, but the cost-saving initiatives are grouped at the bottom for easier reference.
The following posts tell the story of how I completed these challenges and significantly reduced billing.
Index
[!attention] Not all posts are written yet, and my goal is to publish them as quickly as possible.
Observability
- Grafana Implementation.
- Datadog Frontend Implementation.
- Datadog Backend Implementation.
- Uptime Kuma Implementation.
Security
- Fraud Mitigation.
- CSRF Tokens implementation.
- Google reCaptcha Enterprise.
- WAF Implementation.
- Bot Control with Captcha.
- SQL Injection rules.
- Block requests based on Regex Patterns.
- Block Requests based on IP.
- Fraud Detection Panel on Grafana.
- Content Security Policies.
- Security - SSH Access from external Big Data Apps
DevOps & CI/CD
- No Blame Culture.
- Cloudformation Implementation.
- Make Pattern.
- App Containerization.
- Pipelines.
- Trunk-based deployments.
- Feature Branch deployments.
- Hotfix Deployments.
- Docker Multi Stage Pipelines.
- Empowering our QA team in order to prevent our flow to production from getting stuck
- Empowering non technical users by allowing feature branch deployments from Slack
- Sonarqube.
- AB environment.
- Speed up the main website by implementing Image Transformations
- Varnish as an Easy Way to Boost Pagespeed with Incredible Results
- Improving Page Speed by Turning Vue.js Production Mode ON
- Early Fraud Detection with Slack Notifications
Cost Savings - Saving over 191k yearly.
- Savings over $3,600 by Scheduling Feature Branch environments removal
- Saving over $3,000 yearly by Removing unused IP addresses
- Saving more than 80% in bandwidth costs by implementing a CDN - $13,192.32 yearly
- Saving $23,640 by just optimizing queries
- Saving $7,338 yearly by implementing OpenVPN
- Saving $8,220 and increasing high availability by migrating the main app to containers.
- $6,120 in savings by moving a database to the private subnet
- How I avoided the company to pay $100k yearly on Aurora RDS
- Saving over 26% in Compute Reserved Instances ($4,600 yearly)
- Saving 42% in RDS instances by Reserving Capacity - $16,240 yearly
- Saving $5,473 by Removing Redundant Application Load Balancers
- Total Costs Savings - over $191k Yearly.
These are a few of the remarkable stories I have collected during my time with the company, and they are proof of what we can achieve when willing to improve.
