Dmitry Kireev
Second Head Debugged Articles About Now
Dmitry Kireev

Hi, I'm Dmitry!

Cloud Infrastructure Architect with a proven track record of 17+ years of production experience and more than 12 years of experience in AWS.

Expert in Terraform, Containerization with plenty of relevant hands-on experience in designing and implementing scalable systems in many industries as a short- and long-term consultant.

1.1.1. Atun: Seamless AWS VPCs SSH & SSM Tunnels

  • Stack: Go, Viper, Cobra

  • Deployment: Local cli install

  • Description: Seamless Tunnels: Access AWS VPCs with SSH & SSM without exposing a bastion host to the internet.

    Atun is a CLI tool that simplifies access to private AWS VPC resources by utilizing SSH tunnels configured via EC2 tags. It enables connections to services such as RDS and Redis through EC2 bastion hosts, eliminating the need for a VPN.

  • Stack: Go, Viper, Cobra
  • Deployment: Local cli install
  • Description: Opinionated tool for infrastructure and code.

This tool is designed as a simple wrapper around popular tools, so they can be easily integrated in one infra: terraform, ECS deployment, serverless, and others.

It combines infra, build and deploy workflows in one and is too simple to be considered sophisticated. So let’s not do it but rather embrace the simplicity and minimalism.

  • Stack: Terraform
  • Deployment: ECS
  • Description: Terraform module to create and manage AWS ECS application in a clean abstracted way.
  • Dozens of successful projects with full Infrastructure as Code implementation (I prefer Terraform, Git, Github Actions).
  • Battle-tested solutions to bootstrap any AWS infrastructure in a very short time.
  • Expert in resilient self-healing IaC AWS infrastructure. CI and full cycle configuration management that actually works.
  • Experienced with container orchestration tools: Docker, EKS & ECS.
  • Developer Experience advocate: prefer Software Engineering Teams to be free from operational toil, while still having access to change.
  • Sufficient amount of production experience to maintain & troubleshoot complex systems and make complex decisions.
  • More than a decade of experience with Docker. Able to design and implement complex image delivery pipelines.
  • Coding in Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, GoLang and Shell (tooling, rather than products).
  • Enjoy problem-solving and implement blame-less troubleshooting approach. Able to solve both local and distributed issues.
  • Equally capable of building infrastructures from scratch and maintaining existing infrastructures with or without proper documentation.

Sometimes people reach out to me when there is an issue with their application (usually performance). I enjoy getting to the root-cause of it, propose fixes by which the team can be unblocked.

I also take projects with fixed scope. Examples include:

Usually it takes a fixed amount of time (and a fixed, negotiable, amount of money).

In exceptional cases I accept full-time projects, but only if I can make a significant impact and truly believe in the project. Last Full-Time engagement was in 2017-2019, with Flo Technologies, an IoT leak prevention device (acquired by Moen) I’ve designed, built and maintained the whole infrastructure from scratch.

I sometimes work with Toptal, a well-known Talent Network. I can recommend it. There are definitely Cloud Architects who deserve it more, but I’m still humbled by being part of the network.

As a Principal Cloud Architect I’ve spearheaded infrastructure (re)design and took care of the implementation and maintenance for the following projects:

  1. Scalable Browser Automation System (AWS, MongoDB, ECS, Terraform, GitOps, Selenium Grid, C#)
  2. Game Asset Marketplace SaaS (AWS, EKS, Rancher, EC2, C#)
  3. Fintech & Web3 SaaS (AWS, Terraform, Serverless, ECS, Stellar Blockchain, Docker and Podman, C#)
  4. Mass Messaging System SaaS (AWS, ECS, Terraform, Ruby on Rails, Serverless, ECS, Datadog)
  5. Machine Learning Video Streaming SaaS (AWS, ECS, Terraform, Python, Flask, OpenCV, FFmpeg, TypeScript, Docker and Podman, Datadog)
  6. IoT Cloud Platform for a smart water device (AWS, Elastic Beanstalk, Docker, Ansible, CloudFormation, TICK stack)
  7. ML Wagering Data SaaS (AWS, ECS, Python, Django, Celery)
  8. B2B Betting Platform SaaS (AWS, Serverless, Terraform)
  9. NFT Sport Predictive Gaming Saas (AWS, ECS, Terraform, Ruby on Rails)
  10. Group Location Social Network (AWS, Elastic Beanstalk, CloudFormation, NodeJS)
  11. Local Home Foods Chain SaaS (AWS, ECS, Terraform, Python)
  12. AI Code Analysis Platform (AWS, ECS, Terraform, Python)

Check out my LinkedIn for more DevOps Consultant work that I’ve taken in the past.

I just log my experience, thoughts and observations here. My hope is they will be useful to you or myself in the future (See What’s Second Head?). Sometimes thoughts are more structured and may end up in How To.

There is always something, see Now.