Waitrose

Context

I worked as a DevOps engineer on the platform behind Waitrose’s e-commerce services, mainly on AWS and across several business units. The work spanned moving off legacy infrastructure, running the Kubernetes platform, delivery pipelines and day-to-day operations.

What I did

Cloud migration and self-service. Led initiatives to migrate legacy infrastructure to the cloud and developed a self-service portal for provisioning and de-provisioning resources, so teams could get what they needed with automation and resilience built in.

Kubernetes platform. Managed highly available EKS clusters, with a focus on security, efficient release management and smooth microservice deployments using Helm.

Infrastructure and configuration as code. Provisioned cloud infrastructure with CloudFormation, Terraform and Crossplane, and managed configuration with Ansible, including custom modules and plugins. Crossplane also provisioned Grafana and AWS resources, which kept resource management consistent across clouds and tools.

GitOps delivery. Used ArgoCD for declarative, version-controlled Kubernetes deployments.

CI/CD. Designed, built and maintained pipelines in Groovy DSL, with blue/green and canary deployments and quality checks early in the pipeline. I also looked after the tooling around them: Jenkins, Nexus, SonarQube, Contrast, Keycloak and the Elastic Stack.

Observability and on-call. Instrumented more than 150 microservices and built automated monitoring with CloudWatch, Grafana, Prometheus, Grafana On-Call and PagerDuty. Day-to-day operations included log aggregation with the Elastic Stack for performance monitoring.

Cost visibility. Built cost optimisation metrics to track total cloud spend and support cost-effective resource allocation.