Rakesh Vudutha
LIVE · PIPELINES PASSING  ·  📍 NEW JERSEY
Rakesh Vudutha

Staff Release Engineer · SRE · DevOps

I own the last mile of software delivery —
from commit to production, safely and often.

4+ years managing enterprise releases, CI/CD automation, and cloud reliability.

I lead end-to-end release management for business-critical enterprise platforms — building GitLab CI/CD automation, orchestrating with HashiCorp Nomad & Consul, migrating workloads from AWS to Azure, and delivering zero-downtime production releases while keeping delivery SOX-compliant and audit-ready.

4+ yrs
Release Engineering
Zero
Downtime, by design
100%
Manual deploys automated
SOX
Audit-ready by design
01

Trace a release

Watch a commit travel my real delivery path — from a merge request all the way to Production and DR. Every stage is tested, scanned, and approved before it ships. Try injecting a failure and see it roll back with zero downtime.

release-pipeline · erp-core · main
// ready. click “Trace a release” to ship a build through the pipeline.
02

The tradeoff

Every release decision balances three forces. Drag the point to weight Speed, Reliability, and Compliance — and watch how deploy frequency, change-failure rate, and audit-readiness move together. There's no free lunch; the job is choosing the right balance for a SOX-governed ERP platform.

tradeoff.model — drag to re-weight
⚡ Speed 🛡 Reliability 📋 Compliance
Deploy frequencyDaily
Change-failure rateLow
Audit readinessStrong

Balanced profile — steady cadence with reliability and audit trails intact.

03

Resilience — Nomad + Consul

This is the orchestration story behind my zero-downtime claim. Click any node to take it down. Consul's health checks catch it, traffic reroutes to healthy instances, and Nomad reschedules the workload automatically — no page, no manual intervention.

nomad · consul · erp-core service mesh

👉 Click a node to simulate a failure.

// cluster healthy — 3 nodes, 6 allocations, all checks passing.
04

Deploy pipeline

A run through the CI/CD stages I own end-to-end. Note the change approval gate — nothing reaches Production without an explicit approval. That segregation of duties is what keeps the SOX auditors happy.

gitlab-ci · azure-devops · erp-core
// idle. click “Run pipeline” to build, scan, approve, and ship.
05

Shell

A working terminal. Type help to see what it knows — or try whoami, nomad job status, skills, or contact. Use ↑ / ↓ for history.

 rakesh@release — zsh
Welcome to rakesh@release. Type help to get started.
rakesh@release~$
06

Track record

Where I've owned the release process.

ZT Systems Current
Staff Release Engineer / DevOps Engineer
Nov 2023 — Present
  • Own end-to-end release management for ERP applications across UAT, Production, and DR — consistently delivering zero-downtime releases.
  • Automate deployments with HashiCorp Nomad & Consul (job scheduling, service discovery, health checks) integrated with GitLab CI/CD and Azure DevOps across Azure App Services.
  • Manage all deployments end-to-end and automated every previously-manual release — provisioning with Terraform, containerized workloads on Kubernetes & Docker across AWS and Azure, with Splunk observability throughout.
  • Administer the enterprise GitLab platform — repositories, runners, RBAC & access management, branch protection, and merge-request policies.
  • Lead SOX compliance & audit readiness — deployment approvals, segregation of duties, change management and release approvals, release documentation, and audit evidence.
  • Own Coverity SAST and DevSecOps controls in CI/CD, with HashiCorp Vault for secrets and password rotation.
  • Drive Go/No-Go decisions, rollback planning, and observability with Splunk, Dynatrace, Prometheus & Grafana to catch issues before users do.
TD Bank
Sr. Cloud DevOps Engineer
Aug 2022 — Oct 2023
  • Migrated and managed applications from on-premises to AWS (EC2, S3, RDS, VPC, IAM, Route 53) with CloudWatch alarms and Lambda for auto-scaling and self-healing infrastructure.
  • Built CI/CD pipelines in AWS with GitLab and Terraform, managing infrastructure as code end-to-end.
  • Shifted DevOps workflows to a DevSecOps model, embedding security testing at each stage; monitored with Prometheus and Grafana.
07

What I focus on

The problems I gravitate toward — release safety, automation, and compliance that's built in rather than bolted on.

⚙️ Manage & automate all deployments

I own every deployment end-to-end — and automated all of them. Every manual, hand-run release is now a repeatable, zero-touch pipeline.

GitLab CI/CDAzure DevOpsPythonPowerShellAnsible

🚦 Zero-downtime releases

Blue/green and rolling deploys with health-gated cutovers so users never feel a release land.

NomadConsulAzure App Services

☸️ Kubernetes & containers

Containerized workloads scheduled and self-healed across Kubernetes, Docker, and Nomad.

KubernetesDockerNomad

🏗 Infrastructure as Code

Reproducible infrastructure with Terraform and Packer across AWS and Azure — nothing built by hand.

TerraformPackerAWSAzure

🔐 DevSecOps & secrets

Coverity SAST gates and Vault-managed secrets and rotation, enforced in the pipeline.

CoverityVault

📋 SOX & audit readiness

Segregation of duties, change management, and automatic audit evidence for every release.

Change mgmtApprovalsEvidence

🛠 GitLab platform admin

Runners, RBAC, branch protection, and merge-request policy for the whole engineering org.

GitLabRBAC

📈 Observability

Splunk, Dynatrace, Prometheus & Grafana to catch issues before users do — logs, metrics, and traces on every release.

SplunkDynatracePrometheusGrafana

Toolbox

GitLab CI/CDAzure DevOpsAzure App ServicesAWSHashiCorp NomadConsulVaultTerraformPackerKubernetesDockerAnsibleCoverity SASTSplunkDynatracePrometheusGrafanaPythonPowerShellBashJira
08

Got a gnarly release problem? Let's talk.

Open to Release Engineering / DevOps / SRE roles. Based in New Jersey — open to hybrid, on-site, or remote.