Gabriel Coutu
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EXPERIENCE IN CONTEXT

Production experience

Anonymized case studies. Migrations described here were progressive.

EXPERIENCE IN CONTEXT

Real production challenges, at meaningful scale.

CASE / 01OBSERVABILITY

Modernizing observability across a production fleet

Evolve host-by-host monitoring into centralized metrics and log pipelines suited to significant data volumes.

CONTEXT

An organization operating approximately 200 servers relied on Nagios and ad hoc SSH access. Metrics and logs came from separate systems, complicating investigation and monitoring improvements.

WORK

Contributed to a progressive evolution toward Prometheus and Thanos, then VictoriaMetrics for metrics. For logs, Vector was used as Loki evolved toward Quickwit. Grafana and Alertmanager supported exploration and alert handling.

  • Approximately 600 GB of metrics retained over a two-month window.
  • Approximately 4 TB of logs processed over a three-week window.
  • Observability pipelines and tooling modernized progressively.
ARCHITECTURE / TRANSITION

BEFORE

  1. Nagios
  2. Ad hoc SSH
  3. Fragmented monitoring

EVOLUTION

  1. 01Hosts and services
  2. 02Centralized collection
  3. 03VictoriaMetrics + Quickwit
  4. 04Grafana + alerts
TECHNOLOGIES
PrometheusThanosVictoriaMetricsVectorLokiQuickwitGrafanaAlertmanager

Volumes are indicative and reflect the reported retention windows. This case study is anonymized and does not claim that one engagement alone produced every operational outcome.

CASE / 02PLATFORM ENGINEERING

Progressively evolving a legacy platform to Kubernetes and GitOps

Gradually replace a custom deployment stack with a more declarative and reproducible Kubernetes platform.

CONTEXT

A production platform relied on LXC containers, custom Debian packages, and Perl scripts. Evolving and reproducing it required substantial manual effort.

WORK

Contributed to a progressive migration to bare-metal Kubernetes with FluxCD, Helm, and GitOps practices. SOPS for secrets, Velero backups, and Ceph storage were part of the ecosystem. Also experienced a fleet of more than ten clusters managed with Cluster API.

  • Transition proceeded in stages, with legacy and Kubernetes platforms coexisting during the evolution.
  • Experience with a Kubernetes environment of approximately 20 nodes.
  • Management of a 10+ cluster fleet with Cluster API, described separately from the approximately 20-node environment.
ARCHITECTURE / TRANSITION

BEFORE

  1. LXC containers
  2. Custom Debian packages
  3. Perl scripts

EVOLUTION

  1. 01Declarative Git
  2. 02FluxCD + Helm
  3. 03Kubernetes
  4. 04Ceph + Velero
TECHNOLOGIES
KubernetesFluxCDArgo CDHelmCluster APISOPSVeleroCeph

The scope evolved in stages. The approximately 20 nodes and fleet of more than ten clusters describe distinct experience and are not combined.