Robert Russell

Staff Cloud Engineer

I build and run Azure infrastructure. Nine years of it, most recently across a twenty-service Kubernetes platform.

Based
Seattle, Washington
Doing
Azure, Kubernetes, Terraform
Code
github.com/robertrussell-dev

Experience

Staff Cloud Engineer 2024–2026 Premier Inc. Cloud infrastructure strategy across a 20-microservice AKS platform behind a procurement analytics product.
Senior Cloud Engineer 2023 Eliassen Group, contracted to Premier Inc. Cost and security posture across multiple Azure subscriptions.
Senior Cloud Systems Engineer 2018–2023 QuoteWizard, acquired by LendingTree. Earlier as Systems Engineer and Systems Administrator.

BS in Information Technology, University of West Florida, 2017, with a Global Cyber Alliance project testing DNS response policy zones on AWS.

Capabilities

Kubernetes and platform

AKS, Helm, NGINX Ingress and Gateway API, Container Apps with .NET Aspire. Right-sizing driven by measured usage.

Pipelines and delivery

Azure DevOps YAML multi-stage pipelines, GitHub Actions, Release Flow branching, and branch policy that makes the path from work item to production auditable.

Infrastructure as code

Terraform and Bicep, including how modules find and call each other once a repository has hundreds of files.

Observability and cost

Application Insights with distributed tracing, KQL dashboards, consumption tracking for AI workloads, and the cost work that follows from being able to see usage.

Security and identity

WAF traffic analysis across Azure Front Door, dependency remediation with Sonatype IQ, Entra ID, Intune, and RBAC built to survive an audit.

Automation

PowerShell, C#, Python and Bash. Ticketing automation, ETL into Snowflake, and a Copilot extensibility framework used across 30+ repositories.

Work

Colophon

This site is its own example

Static files on Azure Static Web Apps, described entirely in Terraform and deployed with one command. It costs nothing a month to run. The only resource on the bill is a storage table holding a few kilobytes of game scores, which prices out below a cent.

The infrastructure page prints the file that created the thing you are reading it on. The whole site can be destroyed and rebuilt from that file in about a minute.

Read the Terraform that hosts this page →