resume
Ajay Akilan
Site Reliability Engineer · Bangalore, India
ajayakilan573@gmail.com · open to relocation, India and Europe
Service owner for Zoom’s instant-messaging microservices — backend APIs, the real-time messaging layer, and the public edge — across fifteen production regions on three clouds. Full production ownership: releases, incidents, capacity, cost.
Experience
Site Reliability Engineer · ZoomJuly 2021 — present · Bangalore
—Owned the move of the messaging services from virtual machines and configuration management onto Kubernetes, building the infrastructure definitions and deployment pipelines with verification embedded rather than added afterwards. Deploys went from hours to under three minutes, rollbacks to under two.
—Led the replatform of the public edge layer across the production fleet on two clouds — phased traffic cutovers, automated verification and failover validation at each stage, no customer impact, edge cost on the largest cluster halved.
—Built the automated release-verification framework for the messaging services. A full multi-cluster release went from about seven hours to fifty-two minutes, with verification running against every pod instead of one sample per cluster.
—Ran the active-active rollout for the chat backend and edge services across fourteen of fifteen production clusters, owning the networking, scheduling and TLS lifecycle work underneath it.
—Wrote the Python CLI that all traffic cutovers run through: resolution tracing with live health data, bulk weight changes behind a preview–confirm–apply flow, an audit line per change. Adopted by DevOps teams elsewhere in the company.
—Built production clusters from nothing on three clouds, including one region delivered end to end — infrastructure, five services, active-active enablement, edge migration — and on segregated accounts meeting government data-residency requirements.
—Built out observability for the services: hundreds of dashboards, severity-tiered alerting tied to runbooks, and service level objectives defined with the development team rather than handed to them.
—Led cost optimisation for the services I own — right-sizing, storage and capacity-mode tuning, cache sizing, tightening requests and limits against observed usage — for per-cluster reductions between 29 and 77 percent and six-figure annual savings.
—Incident commander for the messaging estate through hundreds of P0 and P1 events; on call since my third month and the standing escalation point across India, US and China. In five years, no customer-impacting incident caused by a change of mine.
Numbers
15production regions
3clouds — AWS, Azure, OCI
7 hrs → 52 minrelease cycle
hours → 3 mindeploy time
14 of 15clusters active-active
29–77%cost reduction per cluster
100,000+records in the DNS zone
~90%global releases run from India
10–15 hrsmanual work removed weekly
99.99%platform availability
Toolbox
CloudAWS — EKS, EC2, Route 53, DynamoDB, ElastiCache, VPC, IAM, Lambda, S3, CloudFormation · Azure — AKS, Cosmos DB, Functions, Azure Cache for Redis · Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
Containers and orchestrationKubernetes (CKA), Docker · requests and limits, resource quotas, autoscaling, namespace conventions, RBAC, service topology, ingress
CI/CD and deliveryJenkins, GitLab CI, Tekton, an internal Kubernetes delivery platform · canary, blue-green, rolling, active-active, isolated pre-production nodes · automated verification gates, parallel deploy and rollback
Infrastructure as codeTerraform (remote state, plan-review-apply), Ansible · protected branches, mandatory peer review, ticket-linked changes
ObservabilityPrometheus, Grafana, Elasticsearch and Kibana, an internal metrics platform · SLI/SLO definition, severity-tiered alerting tied to runbooks, log-based alerting, process monitoring, incident command
Networking and edgeNGINX, OpenResty and Lua, NGINX Plus · NLB/ALB, DNS at scale with weighted and health-checked routing, VPC peering, TLS certificate lifecycle
Data and cachingDynamoDB, Cosmos DB, Redis, Valkey, ElastiCache · capacity-mode and storage-tier tuning, cache sizing
LanguagesPython (boto3, CLI tooling, automation), Bash, Lua · Linux production debugging — strace, netstat, lsof
Certifications
Certified Kubernetes AdministratorFeb 2025
Kubernetes and Cloud Native AssociateJan 2025
AWS Certified Cloud PractitionerApr 2023
AWS Solutions Architect ProfessionalIn progress
Education
B.E. Electronics and Communication EngineeringMadras Institute of Technology, Anna University · 2021English (full professional) · Tamil (native)