Naveen Alakunta

National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) - www.npci.org.in

• Provisioned and managed highly available Kubernetes clusters using HA-Proxy to support fault-tolerant internal applications.
• Installed and maintained the Harness application on Kubernetes using Helm, ensuring application resilience and rollback capabilities.
• Designed and implemented backup and disaster recovery (DR) solutions using Velero and MinIO, validating restore workflows.
• Automated infrastructure provisioning using Terraform, managing AWS resources including VPCs, subnets, EKS, EC2, IAM, RDS, EFS, and S3.
• Managed core AWS services such as: Compute: EC2, Lambda, EKS, ECS; Storage: S3, EBS, EFS; Networking: VPC, Route 53, Elastic Load Balancers, DNS; Database: RDS, DynamoDB; Identity & Access Management: IAM policies, roles; Elasticity: Auto Scaling Groups, Load Balancing.
• Worked extensively with Kafka, Redis, KeyDB, and Cassandra to understand distributed data flows and ensure fault-tolerant infrastructure.
• Collaborated with cross-functional teams to enhance observability, automation, and reliability across UPI services contributing to a 20% improvement in system stability metrics.
• National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) - www.npci.org.in

• Maintained CI/CD pipelines with GitLab CI, Jenkins, GitHub Actions, and ArgoCD for efficient Docker builds and Kubernetes deployment.
• Automated repetitive tasks through Ansible playbooks, ensuring streamlined password rotation and environment setup.
• Implemented infrastructure updates and monitoring across various platforms to improve operational consistency.
• Conducted resilience assessments for key financial systems such as RuPay, focusing on fault tolerance.
• Utilized chaos experimentation techniques to identify weaknesses and enhance system reliability.
• Simulated real-world failure scenarios on Kubernetes clusters to test system robustness.
• Managed controlled disruptions to track performance metrics and logs during stress testing.
• Achieved a ~35% improvement in fault detection efficiency, leading to reduced mean time to recovery.

• Provisioned and managed infrastructure as code (IaC) with Terraform to deploy AWS infrastructure across multiple environments, reducing manual errors by approximately 50%.
• Configured auto-scaling groups and load balancers to achieve 99.9% application availability and ensure fault-tolerant delivery.
• Designed secure VPC architectures utilizing public/private subnets, NAT gateways, and custom route tables, enhancing network isolation and security posture by around 40%.

• Designed and deployed highly available Kubernetes clusters on AWS EKS and on-prem VMware.
• Integrated Prometheus and Grafana to enhance observability, reducing troubleshooting time by approximately 35%.
• Implemented RBAC, resource quotas, and network policies for effective Kubernetes cluster management.
• Customized Helm chart structures to improve configuration reusability and decrease deployment time by approximately 30%.
• Wrote and optimized Dockerfiles for efficient application containerization, enhancing scalability.
• Configured HAProxy and Ingress-NGINX for high availability and intelligent traffic routing in Kubernetes applications.
• Developed a two-site backup and migration strategy using MinIO and Velero for disaster recovery.
• Ensured minimal downtime during site migrations, increasing backup reliability for critical workloads.

• Managed AWS cloud resources using Terraform, ensuring consistent, scalable infrastructure deployments.
• Designed modular Terraform code structures for environment-specific configurations.
• Secured Terraform state management with AWS S3 and DynamoDB to prevent race conditions.
• Developed Ansible playbooks for automating system configurations and application deployments.
• Created custom shell scripts to automate server connectivity setup, enhancing onboarding efficiency.
• Automated log simplification workflows, integrating scripts into CI/CD pipelines with GitLab and Jenkins.
• Streamlined deployment processes, resulting in faster feedback cycles and improved accuracy.