Panagiotis Tsafaridis

Developed and implemented a versatile Terraform base for all product teams, prioritizing ease of use, flexibility, and multi-environment/region support, resulting in a widely adopted skeleton structure that enhances productivity and efficiency across teams.

Successfully designed, coordinated, and implemented an enterprise network topology on AWS using the HUB-Spoke strategy for centralized account connectivity, leveraging TransitGateway to manage traffic through route tables and firewall, and establishing seamless cross-regional communication among eu-central-1, us-east-1, and ap-southeast-1 with TransitGateway Global-Peering. Streamlined the entire project with Terragrunt for enhanced efficiency, resulting in a well-connected and automated network topology that meets business needs.

Developed and implemented a secure and accessible strategy for product teams to make changes to systems they don’t normally have direct access to, establishing a community organization for firewall, datadog, account management, and other areas with easy-to-use Terraform projects tailored to meet the needs of the teams without requiring a deep understanding of Terraform. Automated the entire process through Github Actions, and ensured every change was reviewed through a pull request by the Platform team, resulting in a streamlined and efficient system that promotes productivity and collaboration.”

Collaborated with the Platform team to identify areas for improvement and provided valuable advisory support in the creation of new organizational processes to enhance collaboration, resulting in a more cohesive team and improved productivity.

Successfully developed and implemented a Terraform project that effectively manages AWS firewall rules, overcoming the challenge of the AWS API’s lack of a process to remove a rule group from the AWS firewall policy before deletion. Developed a detach and attach rule group Terraform module that efficiently performs this task, and established the project as a community initiative, enabling product teams to easily adjust firewall rules through pull requests and reducing reliance on the platform engineering team, resulting in a more efficient workflow and enhanced productivity.

Played a key role in the successful implementation of a centralized logging and monitoring solution at Statista, leading the planning and coordination efforts in collaboration with Datadog to execute a proof-of-value (PoV) project that prioritized key elements such as terraform automation, single sign-on, logging, application performance monitoring, and tagging concepts. As a result of overseeing the PoV project and skillfully integrating the new solution with the entire Statista infrastructure, operational workflows were significantly streamlined, and monitoring capabilities were vastly improved.

Pioneered the development of a robust solution for the centralized provision of vital information required by every terraform or terragrunt project for AWS accounts. Recognizing that the platform team’s terraform/terragrunt projects for deploying the cloud framework required the same information, a comprehensive catalog was created that provides all necessary details such as naming conventions and network CIDR ranges, automatically generated for easy consumption by each terraform/terragrunt project. This solution successfully eliminated the need to manually add critical information to each project as the accounts expand, optimizing the efficiency of the cloud framework deployment process.

Conceptualized and planned a successful cloud migration from Amazon Web Services to Google Cloud, ensuring a seamless transition and optimized performance for the client.

Designed and implemented a Kubernetes cluster on Google Cloud (GKE), optimized for autoscaling Gitlab runners with focus on cost efficiency, featuring node pools that provide nodes only when required, and leveraging preemptible nodes to minimize costs while maintaining high performance and scalability.

Designed and deployed a Kubernetes cluster on GKE to enable a comprehensive logging and application performance monitoring solution, utilizing a suite of tools including Prometheus, Grafana, Graylog, MongoDB, and Elasticsearch.

Performed ongoing maintenance and service for Google Cloud resources, regularly updating Helm Charts and importing updates for provided applications, ensuring reliable and up-to-date infrastructure for clients.

Developed and implemented a log event transmission strategy for non-standard log files, converting the logs into a contemporary format and sending them to Graylog via fluentd and multiline(RegEx), ensuring effective log management and analysis.

Provided guidance to internal staff and collaborated on the development of GROK patterns within Graylog, enabling the mapping of logs processed by fluentd into usable and searchable attributes, facilitating effective log management and analysis.

Established Graylog pipelines that extracted values from message blocks based on regex and mapped them into usable and searchable attributes for developers, facilitating streamlined log management and analysis.