Ioannis Gkourtzounis

Ioannis Gkourtzounis has a High First Degree in Computing (BSc) and holds two ISTQB® certifications, he is a Certified Jenkins Engineer (CJE), a Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD), a Kubernetes Administrator (CKA), and a Kubernetes Security Specialist (CKS).

After the DevOps World in Lisbon 2019, Ioannis focused exclusively in Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery, Cloud Native technologies and especially Kubernetes. During the last years, he was a key member in various CI/CD and Kubernetes related DevOps projects, where Security was always a first class citizen.

What I Do

Build HA Kubernetes clusters

Build and manage reliable Highly Available Kubernetes clusters: a management cluster handles application deployments and provides monitoring and alerting of other Kubernetes clusters, that act as isolated environments. Setup HA Control Plane nodes with HAProxy and keepalived. Explore HA topologies and utilize Kube-vip in a stacked ETCD cluster. Create a step by step plan for disaster recovery.

Implement CI/CD pipelines

Install and configure Argo CD to apply GitOps principles. Describe and configure environments in one or multiple Kubernetes clusters. Use automation pipelines to reset these environments and revert them to their initial state. Create automated pipelines that build applications and deploy them to different environments, by updating the Git repository that defines the desired state of the clusters.

Deploy essentials to Kubernetes

Create automation scripts that configure GitOps with Argo CD. Use NFS shares for Pod storage with dynamic NFS Provisioner, and Vault for secure secrets management in the cluster. Deploy Harbor Registry and sign container images with Cosign. Setup Jenkins with dynamic Agents for cluster optimized CI/CD pipelines. Get cluster metrics with Prometheus and display them in Grafana dashboards.

Security in all stages of the SDLC

Make sure that all new images pass the security assessments in the Build pipelines. Deploy only signed images and perform automated vulnerability scans with Trivy on all container images. Install and configure Falco for security monitoring of containers at runtime. Use Wazuh to get CIS benchmark results on hosts with Ubuntu and RHEL OS, and perform mitigation actions.

My Certifications

Resume

6+ Years of Experience

Experience

2025 - Today
ARHS Group

DevOps Team Lead

Lead a DevOps team across two high-profile EU projects
Be the liaison between the stakeholders and the DevOps engineers
Manage resource allocation and deliverables according to priorities
Manage cluster resources on IBM Cloud and AWS for different projects
Create and configure multiple OpenShift clusters according to specifications
Configure OpenShift Operators for logging, monitoring and alerting

2022 - 2024
ARHS Hellas

Senior DevOps Engineer

Implemented multi-cloud architectures for on-premises Kubernetes clusters
Configured GitOps with Argo CD for automated deployments
Set up Jenkins with dynamic agents for cluster-optimized CI/CD pipelines
Gathered metrics with Prometheus and configured Grafana dashboards
Collected application logs with Promtail and used Loki for log aggregation

2020 - 2022
Onelity

DevOps Engineer

Deployed applications with Helm Charts by creating Argo CD applications
Implemented CI/CD pipelines for build, test and deploy phases
Implemented autoscaling Jenkins pipelines based on application metrics

2018 - 2019
Onelity

QA Automation Engineer & Instructor

Implemented a test automation framework with Selenium, Cucumber and BDD
Implemented parallel test execution with Jenkins, Docker and Selenium Grid
Training Instructor for ISTQB Foundation Level and Agile Tester certifications

Education

2016 - 2018
University of Northampton

Undergraduate BSc (Hons) Degree in Computing

Graduated with High First-Class Honours A+ > See Award > See Grades
Published paper at EUMAS 2018 Conference on Multi-Agent Systems > Publication

DevOps Skills

Cloud Security

75%

HA Kubernetes Clusters

80%

Kubernetes Administration

85%

Cloud Native Applications

75%

CI/CD Pipelines

85%

Docker & Containers

75%

Scripting & Automation

75%

Linux Administration

75%

Soft Skills

Leadership

80%

Mentoring

85%

Collaboration

80%

Adaptability

75%

Portfolio

My Works
Multi-Cluster Observability Platform

Multi-Cluster Observability Platform

Kubernetes Homelab, Presentations & Demos
Dedicated Rook Ceph Cluster

Dedicated Rook Ceph Cluster

Kubernetes Homelab, Presentations & Demos
Homelab with VMware & Kubernetes

Homelab with VMware & Kubernetes

Kubernetes Homelab, Presentations & Demos
Multi-Cloud Active-Active

Multi-Cloud Active-Active

Topologies & Diagrams
Multi-Cloud Active-Passive

Multi-Cloud Active-Passive

Topologies & Diagrams
HA Stateful Applications

HA Stateful Applications

Topologies & Diagrams
Kerberos Overview

Kerberos Overview

Topologies & Diagrams
HA with External ETCD

HA with External ETCD

Topologies & Diagrams
HA with Stacked ETCD

HA with Stacked ETCD

Topologies & Diagrams
Kubernetes with Jenkins X

Kubernetes with Jenkins X

Presentations & Demos
EV Sharing: Web Platform + Android App

EV Sharing: Web Platform + Android App

Presentations & Demos
Car Sharing Platform for EVs

Car Sharing Platform for EVs

Publications & Reports
Web Authentication Approaches

Web Authentication Approaches

Publications & Reports
NLP Travel Assistant Chatbot

NLP Travel Assistant Chatbot

Publications & Reports
Microdata Web Parser

Microdata Web Parser

Publications & Reports

Contact

Get in Touch

+306945806510

Thessaloniki, Greece

Freelance Available

How Can I Help You?