Buğra Gökçek

Buğra Gökçek

DevOps, SRE & System Specialist

Kubernetes CKAD Certified · 85%

I build, run, and harden production Kubernetes platforms — from bare-metal hypervisors up to release pipelines. Currently working remotely with Alpata Yazılım ve Teknoloji and OCTAPULL.

Download CV Get in touch
Ankara, Türkiye · Remote github linkedin
01 / About

About

I'm a DevOps, SRE & system specialist working remotely from Türkiye, currently at Alpata Yazılım ve Teknoloji and OCTAPULL. My day-to-day focus is running reliable Kubernetes workloads in production — operating multi-tenant clusters, authoring Helm-based deployments, designing CI/CD pipelines (GitLab CI → GitHub Actions migrations with self-hosted runners, Nexus/Harbor registries, ArgoCD), and stabilizing real-time media infrastructure (LiveKit SFU, HAProxy, nginx, Redis) under live traffic. Most recently I designed and delivered a from-scratch HA production cluster on RKE2 with Traefik + Gateway API and migrated 200+ applications onto it with a NAT-swap cutover.

I also work hands-on at the hypervisor and bare-metal layer. Greenfield on-premises rollouts on Proxmox and VMware vSphere — full lifecycle from rack-up and provisioning, OS installation (Linux and Windows), network and firewall configuration, TLS/certificate management, observability (Prometheus, Grafana, Graylog), and backup/DR with Ceph. Comfortable owning the stack end-to-end: Kubernetes on top, Linux/Windows VMs in the middle, hypervisors at the bottom.

Day-to-day stack: Kubernetes (RKE2, microk8s), Traefik & Gateway API, Helm, Kustomize, ArgoCD, Docker, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Nexus, Harbor, HAProxy/keepalived, Kafka, RabbitMQ, MSSQL, ClickHouse, Graylog, Prometheus/Grafana, Proxmox, VMware vSphere, Ceph, Linux & Windows Server administration, and hybrid AWS + on-prem. Linux Foundation CKAD (Certified Kubernetes Application Developer, 85%) holder.

I care about systems that stay healthy on their own. When something does break, I dig to the root cause — not just until the alert clears.
02 / What I do

What I do

  • Hypervisor & On-Prem Infrastructure

    Greenfield rollouts on Proxmox and VMware vSphere — VM provisioning, OS install (Linux, Windows), networking, firewall, TLS/certs, capacity planning, lifecycle.

  • Kubernetes Platform

    Production cluster operations — Helm charts, ingress, configmaps, secrets, persistent storage, rolling releases. Docker Compose where it fits.

  • CI/CD & Release Engineering

    GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, self-hosted runners, Nexus private registry. Image build, sign, push and Kubernetes deploy flows. GitLab → GitHub Actions migrations.

  • Reliability & Observability

    Prometheus, Grafana, Graylog. Production incident response — debugging to the root cause, not until the alert clears. Real-time media hardening (SFU, TURN, HAProxy, Redis Sentinel).

03 / Experience

Experience

  1. DevOps & System Specialist

    Alpata Yazılım ve Teknoloji
    Nov 2025 – Present · Eskişehir, Turkey · Remote

    Sole owner of production infrastructure for a multi-tenant .NET/Kubernetes platform serving 20+ customer environments (commodity exchanges, manufacturing, aviation) — on-premises, hybrid cloud and Windows/IIS estates. Selected work:

    • Re-platformed production Kubernetes (Sept 2026): designed and built a new HA cluster on RKE2 — 3 masters + 3 workers + 2 HAProxy/keepalived load balancers + NFS, sized from a year of Zabbix telemetry (58 vCPU / 236 GB RAM). Replaced host-nginx + NodePort with Traefik + Gateway API (HTTPRoutes), cert-manager wildcard TLS and Cloudflare Full (strict). Converted the live state of 200+ applications across 9 namespaces with a custom manifest converter, rehearsed on a 6-VM Proxmox lab with chaos/failover drills (measured 1–4 s VIP failover), migrated 2.47 TB via rsync pull and cut over with a NAT swap for a one-step rollback. Post-cutover Traefik tuning (gzip at entrypoint, 3 replicas, anti-affinity) cut page payloads by 77%.
    • CI/CD & artifact infrastructure: migrated pipelines from GitLab CI to GitHub Actions on a fleet of self-hosted runners; private Nexus and Harbor registries; ArgoCD GitOps for newer services; .NET 10 base-image upgrades. Stood up a hardened self-hosted GitLab on Proxmox (Omnibus, DNS-01 Let's Encrypt, ufw, AD DNS) to replace an externally hosted instance.
    • Incident forensics & recovery: root-caused a company-wide NuGet outage to an accidental storage wipe via shell-history forensics, recovered 419 package versions from developer caches and introduced a hybrid Package Source Mapping strategy. Repaired a failed VMware ESXi 7 boot device while preserving the VMFS datastore (zero VM data loss); recovered production MSSQL databases from provider VM snapshots via isolated clone VMs.
    • Observability: designed and deployed an isolated monitoring host — ClickHouse, Graylog (MongoDB + OpenSearch), Prometheus, Grafana, Alloy and Tempo — after evaluating and cutting Mimir, Loki and OpenObserve; kept existing dashboards working unchanged by aliasing datasource UIDs.
    • Messaging, data & real-time: Kafka (KRaft, 3 brokers), RabbitMQ, Redis and Supabase self-hosted on Kubernetes; MSSQL/MongoDB provisioning, cross-server backup/restore and daily DB sync; LiveKit SFU + Whisper transcription with region-split Redis (TR/Gulf); Ocelot API gateway routing for 20+ microservices.
    • Windows & hypervisor ops: IIS + SQL Server 2025 server migrations for customer sites, Proxmox/ESXi VM lifecycle (Ceph → local NVMe ZFS migrations, iLO firmware, LVM online extends), FortiGate policies, VPN and AD administration.
    • Platform hygiene: moved legacy crontab jobs into Kubernetes CronJobs with Kustomize and Sealed Secrets; NFS-backed PVCs replacing hostPath; Headlamp RBAC for developers; automated Hipcall call-recording sync (33k records) and an OSRM routing dataset for Türkiye.

  2. DevOps & System Specialist

    OCTAPULL
    Nov 2025 – Present · Eskişehir, Turkey · Remote

    Production operations and platform engineering for OctaMeet (real-time video conferencing) and OctaPull SFA (mobile field-sales) deployed on Kubernetes. Owning the release cycle, observability, load-balancing (nginx, HAProxy) and TLS/certificate lifecycle. Hardening the real-time media path (SFU, TURN, Redis Sentinel) and the cluster ingress layer for stability under live traffic. Working across multiple environments with cross-cluster image and data flows.

  3. DevOps & System Specialist

    Kloudser
    Jan 2025 – Nov 2025 · 11 months · Ankara, Turkey · On-site

    Worked across DevOps engineering and system administration, building hybrid infrastructure on on-prem, hybrid, and AWS environments. Administered Proxmox virtualization, Linux (Ubuntu, Debian, Kali) and Windows VMs, NAS storage and physical servers, OPNsense firewalls.

    Designed and deployed scalable architectures on AWS (EC2, S3, IAM, DynamoDB, SQS, Lambda, API Gateway, Cognito). Set up GitLab CI/CD pipelines, self-hosted runners, Nexus Repository Manager. Containerized workloads with Docker, Docker Compose, Kubernetes. Worked with Android Cuttlefish emulator + MITMProxy for traffic analysis. MinIO and Keycloak as on-prem S3/IAM equivalents.

  4. DevOps & System Specialist

    OCTAPULL
    Jul 2024 – Jan 2025 · 7 months · Eskişehir, Turkey · Hybrid

    Managed critical infrastructure projects with a focus on scalability and high availability. Led production environment migrations, on-prem deployments, and designed test environments with Kubernetes, Docker, Docker Compose and Nginx load balancing.

    Built observability with Zabbix, Prometheus, and Grafana — including custom dashboards integrated with Jitsi-based video conferencing data. Deep Linux administration, systemd, Bash automation.

  5. Intern Software Engineer

    Anadolu University
    Aug 2023 – Sep 2023 · 2 months · Eskişehir, Turkey · On-site

    AWS EC2 provisioning, secure remote access (SSH, RSA Key-Pairs, Elastic IP). Bash scripting: recursive directory size, tar backup utility, public IPv4 tracking, curl-based REST API automation.

  6. Intern Software Engineer

    KONNEKA Information and Communication Technologies
    Sep 2022 – Dec 2022 · 4 months · Ankara, Turkey · On-site

    Linux (Ubuntu) administration with Netplan networking. Contributed to an enterprise Sandbox security product by refactoring/localizing Python backend scripts. Researched Android malware families (Cerberus, Golden Cup, Defensor ID) with static/dynamic analysis.

  7. Intern Computer Technician

    Turkish Republic State Railways (TCDD A.Ş.)
    Jul 2017 – Aug 2017 · 2 months · Ankara, Turkey

    First-tier IT support, peripheral hardware diagnosis. Digitized HR records into Excel and enterprise systems with careful data handling.

04 / Education

Education

  1. Karadeniz Technical University

    Software Engineering — Bachelor's
    2019 – 2024 · GPA 3.04 / 4.00

  2. Gazi Vocational and Technical High School

    Information Technologies
    2014 – 2018 · Database programming, OOP, web development
05 / Certifications

Certifications

  • CNCF
    Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD) 85%
    Hands-on certification covering application design, deployment, observability, and configuration on Kubernetes — pods, deployments, services, ingress, configmaps/secrets, probes, and resource management.
  • Linux Foundation
    Introduction to GitOps (LFS169)
    GitOps principles and workflows — Git as the single source of truth for declarative infrastructure and application delivery pipelines.
    Feb 17, 2026 · LF-wex05gxt15 · View ↗
  • Linux Foundation
    Introduction to Linux (LFS101)
    Linux command-line, filesystem hierarchy, user and permission management, essential system administration.
    Feb 07, 2026 · LF-cnbs4ta0e3 · View ↗
  • Linux Foundation
    Introduction to Kubernetes (LFS158)
    Core Kubernetes concepts — cluster architecture, workloads, services, storage, container orchestration at scale.
    Jul 19, 2025 · LF-j5qzcl1mq1 · View ↗
  • BTK Academy
    Docker Fundamentals
    Docker installation, container testing and deployment, container security topics.
    No: 8jmhL4dnA9
  • BTK Academy
    Linux OS in Cyber Security
    Linux security fundamentals and shell programming for security workflows.
    No: kK1hVK6v10
  • BTK Academy
    Version Controls: Git and GitHub
    Git version control and GitHub workflows for software development.
    No: GoDfnkne1p
  • BTK Academy
    Rust Programming Language
    Safe, concurrent systems programming in Rust — fast web development and multi-core utilization.
    No: zXztaxk2Dl
06 / Portfolio

Portfolio

Open-source playgrounds and tooling. Production work is documented under Experience.

More on github.com/bugra-gokcek ↗

07 / Contact

Contact

Open to interesting conversations — drop a line.

Location
Ankara, Türkiye · Working remote