Seattle, Washington

Robert Russell.

Staff Cloud Engineer.

Nine years building and running Azure infrastructure at scale. Most of my work is the unglamorous kind that shows up on a bill: right-sizing what is oversized, replacing pipelines nobody wants to touch, and making platform migrations happen without anyone noticing they happened.

Azure Kubernetes / AKS Terraform Bicep Azure DevOps GitHub Actions PowerShell C# KQL
One thing left to fill in

There is deliberately no contact method on this page. Your resume lists a personal phone number and a Gmail address, and neither belongs on a public page unless you decide it does. Tell me how you want to be reached, whether that is an address on this domain, a LinkedIn link, a GitHub link, or nothing at all, and I will add it.

Everything else here comes from your resume. Read it over and tell me what to cut or reword.

Selected results

Numbers, not adjectives

$39,400

Annual Azure savings, a 46% reduction across the resources involved, from right-sizing SQL Elastic Pools, consolidating AI Search from 6 SU to 1, and lifecycle policies over 9 TB.

71%

Cut in Kubernetes CPU requests across 20 AKS workloads, driven by 30 days of Prometheus data, with no measurable performance impact.

19 → 1

Microservice repositories moved from Azure DevOps Classic pipelines to one unified YAML multi-stage pattern with Helm, retiring 96 legacy pipelines.

Zero

Downtime on a platform-wide domain migration spanning 20+ microservices, Kubernetes secrets and every auth flow that depended on them.

Experience

Where I have done it

Staff Cloud Engineer
Premier Inc. · 20-microservice AKS platform behind a procurement analytics SaaS
2024 – 2026
Senior Cloud Engineer
Eliassen Group, contracted to Premier Inc.
2023
Senior Cloud Systems Engineer
QuoteWizard, acquired by LendingTree · earlier, Systems Engineer and Systems Administrator
2018 – 2023

Before that, desktop support at Carnival and an IT internship at Avalex Technologies. BS in Information Technology, University of West Florida, 2017, including a project with the Global Cyber Alliance testing DNS response policy zones on AWS. AZ-104 since 2019.

What I actually work on

Areas

Platform and Kubernetes

AKS administration, Helm, NGINX Ingress and Gateway API, Container Apps with .NET Aspire, resource right-sizing from real metrics rather than guesses.

Pipelines and delivery

Azure DevOps YAML multi-stage pipelines, GitHub Actions, Release Flow branching, branch policies that make the path from work item to production auditable, DORA metrics.

Infrastructure as code

Terraform and Bicep, including how modules find and call each other once a repository has hundreds of files. There is a whole page on this site about that.

Observability and cost

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

Security and identity

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

Writing things that automate

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

Projects

Things you can actually open

This site

It builds itself

Everything here is static files on Azure Static Web Apps, described by about twenty lines of 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 is not a write-up about some other project. It prints the exact file that created the thing you are reading it on, and the whole site can be destroyed and rebuilt from it in about a minute.

See the Terraform that hosts this page →