Hi, I am Akshay. I am an AWS DevOps Engineer with over three years of hands-on experience building and operating production cloud infrastructure. I currently manage a multi-tenant SaaS platform serving more than 1,000 customers, where I work on everything from VPC design and Terraform modules to cost optimization, CI/CD pipelines, and incident response.
I started akshayghalme.com to share the kind of DevOps knowledge I wish I had access to when I was starting out — real production patterns, honest trade-offs, and working code that you can deploy the same day you read about it. Every guide on this site is written from real experience, not theory.
What I Do
My day-to-day work is a mix of infrastructure engineering, cost optimization, and automation. Some of the specific things I focus on:
- AWS architecture and cost optimization — designing VPCs, VPC endpoints, cost-aware service selection, right-sizing, and reserved instance strategy
- Terraform at production scale — writing reusable modules, managing remote state with S3 and DynamoDB locking, and building CI/CD pipelines around
terraform plan - Kubernetes on EKS — production clusters with IRSA, RBAC, autoscaling, and observability
- CI/CD with GitHub Actions — OIDC-based AWS authentication, Docker-to-ECR-to-ECS pipelines, and deployment automation
- Observability — Prometheus, Grafana, CloudWatch, and structured logging patterns
- Incident response and on-call — writing runbooks, root-causing production issues, and building preventive automation
Certifications
- AWS Certified Solutions Architect
- Hands-on experience with most of the AWS core service portfolio — EC2, VPC, RDS, S3, IAM, CloudFront, Route 53, ECS, EKS, Lambda, CloudWatch, Systems Manager, and more
Why I Built This Site
Most DevOps content on the internet falls into one of two extremes: shallow tutorials that copy-paste from AWS documentation without adding anything, or theoretical posts that never touch a production system. There is a gap in the middle for content written by people who actually run the systems they are describing — with the scars and trade-offs that come from doing it for real.
That is what I try to write. Every post on this site either comes from something I have deployed in production, an incident I have debugged, a cost optimization I have actually measured, or a pattern I have repeatedly seen work (or fail) at scale. When I write about Terraform state management, it is because I have lost hours to state lock errors in production. When I write about cost optimization, the numbers are from real AWS bills I reduced.
What You Will Find Here
- Blog — 30+ in-depth production guides, comparisons, and architectural deep dives covering AWS, Terraform, Kubernetes, Docker, CI/CD, and cost optimization
- Terraform modules — open-source modules for common infrastructure patterns: production VPC, RDS, EKS cluster, cost-optimization toolkit
- Free resources — interview prep PDFs, cheat sheets, and production checklists
- Roadmaps & learning paths — structured paths from "I want to learn DevOps" to "I am ready for a senior SRE role"
- Newsletter — DevOps Dispatch, weekly production insights and new guide releases
My Approach to Writing
I write every guide with a simple test in mind: could a reader use this to ship something in production today, or to answer a real question they have at work? If the answer is no, the guide is not ready. This means most of what I publish includes working Terraform code, real commands, actual error messages and how to fix them, and the non-obvious trade-offs that only come up once you have operated a system for a while.
I do not write generic "AWS 101" posts. There are already thousands of those, and they are mostly fine. I write the posts I needed when I was moving from "I can use AWS" to "I can run AWS in production and not burn down the company when something breaks."
Open Source
All the Terraform modules on this site are open source and free to use under the MIT license. You can find them on my GitHub. If you spot a bug or want to contribute, pull requests are welcome.
Let's Connect
If you have questions about a guide, want to suggest a topic, or are interested in working together on DevOps/infrastructure projects, reach out through the contact page or directly on LinkedIn. I read everything and try to respond to technical questions when I can.
Thanks for reading. I hope something here saves you an afternoon of debugging or helps you ship a better piece of infrastructure.