cristian-andrei-calin · bucharest, romania

I build cloud platforms that make production boring.

Twenty years of infrastructure — from HP-UX and Solaris in telecom data centers, through Amazon EC2 support and OpenStack for network virtualization, to Kubernetes fleets on AWS, Azure and GCP. I lead teams by technical example, and I give back as a core maintainer of Kubespray.

Work with me GitHub Kubespray
engineer.yaml applied 
apiVersion: cristicalin.tech/v1
kind: Engineer
metadata:
  name: cristian-andrei-calin
  location: bucharest-romania
  labels:
    role: infrastructure-architect
    company: simplekube
spec:
  clouds: [aws, azure, gcp]
  focus:
    - kubernetes-platforms
    - cloud-architecture
    - devops-leadership
  openSource:
    kubespray: core-maintainer
status:
  experience: 20y  # hp-ux → ec2 → openstack → k8s
  phase: Running
  consulting: Available

spec.experience

Two decades, every layer of the stack

  1. 2022-06 → present

    Owner & Principal Consultant

    SimpleKube SRL · Bucharest, Romania

    Consulting and development for financial and telecom customers moving from on-prem to cloud, or taking cloud-native platforms to the next level of performance. SimpleKube sponsors the open-source Kubespray project.

    • Head the DevOps practice for an African fintech running Kubernetes on AWS, Azure and GCP
    • Blue/Green upgrade process for AWS EKS and Azure AKS clusters
    • Consolidated CI from CodeBuild, Travis CI and Azure DevOps onto self-hosted GitHub Actions runners with granular permissions
    • Developer self-service infrastructure with Crossplane on EKS and AKS
    • Internal Developer Platform delivery based on Backstage
    • Observability migrations: DataDog → CloudWatch → custom → Groundcover SaaS
    • AI-assisted CI gating to block insecure or non-conformant code, and an AI triage agent for observability alerts

  2. 2022-03 → 2022-09

    Systems Architect

    S&T Romania · Bucharest, Romania

    Lead systems architect on two public-sector platforms digitizing the Romanian national adoption and disability-management workflows — hardware, network, storage, hypervisors, operating systems and databases on VMware vSphere and Hyper-V.

  3. 2021-10 → 2022-02

    Linux L3 Engineer

    eMAG Tech · Bucharest, Romania

    Hands-on deep-technical role: hardened internal load balancing for Black Friday traffic, deployed company-wide database monitoring, and built a Python application managing user privileges across a fleet of 800+ MySQL instances.

  4. 2018-09 → 2021-09

    Product Manager & Head of Cloud Development

    Orange Labs Networks · Bucharest, Romania

    Led a team distributed across Romania, France and India delivering Orange IaaS — a reproducible OpenStack private cloud for 4G/5G network function virtualization. Took the product from PoC to V1 in nine months, deployed in five countries, then shipped V2 with advanced SDN.

  5. 2014-11 → 2018-08

    IT Solution Architect

    Orange Labs Services · Bucharest, Romania

    Drove the Openwatt OpenStack platform from PoC through four release upgrades, replacing a rigid vendor reference architecture with a fully CI/CD-driven, containerized design backed by Ceph, with Prometheus-based telemetry.

  6. 2013-10 → 2014-10

    Cloud Support Engineer II

    Amazon Data Services Ireland · Dublin, Ireland

    EC2 Support Operations: customer-facing troubleshooting and architecture reviews, internal subject-matter expert for EC2, EBS and Linux, escalation point and trainer for new hires.

  7. 2011-09 → 2013-09

    IT Infrastructure Solutions Architect

    Orange Romania · Bucharest, Romania

    Extended VMware virtualization across the operator IT estate, built a B2B IT service portfolio, and steered strategic infrastructure decisions — acquisitions, new capabilities, service reshaping.

  8. 2007-07 → 2011-09

    UNIX System Administrator

    Orange Romania · Bucharest, Romania

    Ran HP-UX, Linux and Solaris for billing, CRM and ERP at 99.999% availability, designed the virtual infrastructure for the next-generation billing platform, and managed data center relocation projects.

  9. 2004-11 → 2007-06

    Technical Consultant

    Integrix Consulting (for HP Romania) · Bucharest, Romania

    First- and second-level support for two telecom mediation platforms at Orange Romania, with development in Java, C and UNIX shell, plus performance sizing for traffic growth.

spec.openSource

Giving back upstream

Kubespray — core maintainer since 2021

Kubespray is the Kubernetes SIG project for deploying production-ready clusters with Ansible. As part of the core maintainers team I review pull requests, ship features and fixes, and help set the release roadmap — including rebuilding the CI system, switching the default container runtime from Docker to containerd, and adding AlmaLinux and RockyLinux support. SimpleKube sponsors the project.

spec.skills

The working stack

clouds:

  • AWS
  • GCP
  • Azure
  • OpenStack
  • VMware vSphere / vCloud

platform:

  • Kubernetes
  • Kubespray
  • Crossplane
  • ArgoCD
  • Helm
  • Backstage
  • Terraform
  • Ansible

observability:

  • Prometheus
  • Grafana
  • Elasticsearch
  • Fluent-bit
  • Kibana
  • Groundcover

languages:

  • Python
  • Go
  • C
  • Shell
  • Perl
  • PL/SQL

databases:

  • MySQL / Percona / Aurora
  • PostgreSQL
  • Oracle
  • SQL Server

unix-heritage:

  • Linux
  • HP-UX
  • Solaris
  • AIX
  • FreeBSD
  • Veritas / ServiceGuard clustering

status.contact

Let's make your platform boring too

I consult through SimpleKube SRL on cloud migrations, Kubernetes platforms, developer self-service and everything in between. If your production keeps you up at night, write me.

cristian.calin@simplekube.ro