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About Me

Find below
Photo of Andreas Unterkircher on Mountain Hike
Senior DevOps Engineer

Andreas Unterkircher

Passionate about Kubernetes, CI Pipelines and SaaS services

Career

Completing a technical education, I started my career at a leading Linux consulting company in Vienna, Austria. Soon after I was hired as a Senior Systems Engineer by a renowned Austrian industrial group.

Some time later, I switched to the role of a Senior DevOps Engineer at a aspiring Viennese start-up, which was then acquired by Germany-based social career network “Xing” (New Work SE).

From then on, DevOps has been my mission.

Interests

I’m very interested in Kubernetes and GitLab with their respective ecosystems, have a deep understanding of IT infrastructure and software development processes, and am enthusiastic about supporting and knowledge-share with software developers to mutually inspire.

Hard Skills

Find below production-grade services I implemented and operated, with short use-case descriptions.

Kubernetes

Rancher setup RKE2 and K3S clusters, maintain Rancher-Server
Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) plan, setup, operate, maintain
Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) plan, setup, operate, maintain
Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) plan, setup, operate, maintain
GitOps with Flux CD or Argo CD

Container

Runtime Docker, Podman, LXC
Build with Buildah/Podman or Kaniko (K8s)

Infrastructure as Code / Configuration Management

Terraform from scratch, maintain, write modules
Terragrunt to avoid code repition in Terraform
Puppet Puppetserver, PuppetDB, Foreman, write puppet-module, custom facts
Ansible
Packer customized VM images for hosted or cloud infrastructure

Source Code Management

GitLab CI, DAG pipelines, SAST, Auto DevOps, Merge Trains, Code Coverage, Registries
GitHub Actions
Bitbucket hosted and Atlassian-Cloud

Virtual Private Network (VPN)

Wireguard build a Software Defined Network (SDN) together with Open vSwitch
OpenVPN corporate VPN access, with LDAP authentication (AD)
StrongSWAN site-to-site IPsec tunnels, redundant with dynamic routing

Cluster Systems

Heartbeat
Pacemaker & Corosync configuration centrally managed with Puppet
keepalived floating IP address e.g. for high-availability cluster

Load Balancing

HAProxy to HTTP- and TCP-based service, rate-limiting to mitigate DoS attacks
SQLproxy write to primary, read from multiple standby nodes
Hitch TLS-offloading

HTTP Acceleration

Apache Trafficserver offload serving static assets from backend servers
Varnish speed up page load-time by reduce time-to-first-byte

Programming Languages

Python
PHP
Node.js
C/C++
Perl

Others

HTML, CSS
REST, GraphQL
Shell Scriping Bash4

Message Broker

RabbitMQ native cluster and on Kubernetes

Mailing

SMTP with Exim4, Postfix and Sendmail
IMAP with Dovecot, Cyrus or Courier
Spamassassin train with user-marked spam-mails

Proxy Services

Squid HTTP Proxy
Frox FTP Proxy
microsocks socks5 proxy

Databases (or similar)

MariaDB Multi-Master Galera Cluster, Hot-Backups
PostgreSQL Cluster with Streaming Replication
Redis Sentinel Cluster
Elasticsearch / Opensearch cluster, with >500GiB data, backup via snapshot and store externally

Storage

Ceph RBD storage for Kubernetes, S3 API Rados Gateway
Gluster scaling network-fileservice in distributed replicated mode
NFS redundant fileserver for diskless clients
Samba with Active Directory domain membership
Nextcloud
DRBD

Monitoring

Icinga2 auto-populating Icinga2 configuration feed from PuppetDB data
Prometheus Auto-Discover of Kubernetes pods/services, external-storage
Victoria Metrics cluster, vmalert
PMM2

Logging

Logstash ingest from Nginx, HAProxy, MariaDB events
Grafana Loki

Observability

Grafana operate Grafana, create Grafana Dashboards
Kibana operate, create new dashboards

Operating Systems

Linux Debian, Ubuntu, SuSE, Redhat, CentOS, Alpine Linux
Microsoft Windows Server, Desktop

Virtualization

KVM
VMware

Cloud Environments

Google Cloud Platform Cloud SQL, Cloud Storage, Compute Engine, Kubernetes Engine, Load Balancing, IAM, Cloud Registry, Billing, BigQuery
Microsoft Azure Azure Kubernetes Engine, Load Balancing, IAM, Blob Storage
Amazon Web Services Amazon Kubernetes Engine, Load Balancing, IAM, S3, RDS, Certificate Manager
Hetzner Baremetal, Hetzner Cloud

Others

Wordpress
Odoo OpenERP
Jitsi Video Conferencing, TURN server
Bareos Data Backup
OpenLDAP cluster, with replication (syncrepl)
Kerberos5 high-available, backed by OpenLDAP cluster
Open vSwitch Software Defined Network (SDN), together with Wireguard
Typesetting LaTeX, Markdown

Certifications / Accreditations

Google Cloud Associate Cloud Engineer (2023-2026)
Microsoft Certified IT Professional (MCITP)

Soft Skills

Languages

German native language
English C1

Qualifications / Trainings

Agile Project Management Scrum, Kanban
Communcation and Leadership / Management
Remote Leadership
IT Contract Law