Vassilis Aretakis

Leader in DevOps

Career Summary

Passionate about technology, trying to deliver the best application performance and reliability. Following long term knowledge of IT Infrastructure, cloud and on-premise. Working on transforming from on premise to cloud native. Working with modern immutable containerization
Leading team of engineers delivering the most challenging products

Late Work Experience

Expert DevOps Engineer (DevOps and DevSecOps Tech Lead)

SAP
2021 - present

Working as a Lead Devops engineer, both functional and hands on

  • Mentor, Grow and support DevOps enginers, working closely together to support the product migration to Cloud
  • Lead Workstreams into success of delivering product results
  • Improve scalable infrastructure, looking through multicloud practices
  • Feed value back to organization by leading through example and providing new standards.

Achievements:

  • Improve the team practices and performance, work closely with dev teams to introduce DevOps practices
  • Reduce time to delivery, by introducing Real DevOps and improved CI/CD on large scale. While keeping impact limited

Interesting Picks

  • DevOps Transformation
  • CI/CD transformation
  • Team Leading
  • Agile Methodologies
  • Kubernetes
  • Public Clouds
  • IasS
  • Elastic Search
  • Terraform
  • Helm
  • DevSecOps

Lead DevOps Engineer

Elsevier
2018 - 2021

Leading a team of engineers, to deliver important scientific products. Helping science to excel.

  • Work with five Dev squads, support dev teams and lead the way to devOps practices
  • Implement new CI/CD and Branching strategy accross Development and Operations
  • Introduce containers and immutable infrastructure, by migrating products and supporting dev teams
  • Feed value back to organization by leading through example and providing new standards.

Achievements:

  • Re-build team from scratch, by insourcing
  • Work with new Dev Squads and introduce standardization across squads
  • Reduce time to delivery, by introducing Real DevOps and implement CI/CD. While keeping impact limited

Interesting Picks

  • DevOps Transformation
  • CI/CD transformation
  • Team Leading
  • Agile Methodologies
  • Kubernetes
  • Public Clouds
  • IasS
  • Elastic Search
  • Terraform
  • Helm

Mission Critical Engineer

Schuberg Philis
2017 - 2018

Support Financial institutions, using modern methods on classic software. While keeping short delivery cycles, of a modern setup.

  • Lead the changes in the team, and support Human Factor
  • Introduce modern Container platform.
  • Automate and build Dual Cloud implementation, involving Private/public clouds.

Achievements

Migrated a classic banking to a multi cloud (Private and Public).

Interesting Picks

  • Chef
  • Terraform
  • Jenkins
  • CI/CD
  • Public Clouds
  • Private Clouds
  • Leading

Lead DevOps(DevOps Transformation)

Elsevier B.V.
2016 - 2017

Bring devops to Amsterdam Hub of Elsevier, by delivering fresh technology, in a new product.

Interesting Picks

  • AWS
  • Terraform
  • Puppet
  • Blue/Green

Lead DevOps (DevOps Transformation)

Quby B.V.
2015 - 2016

Lead a team of professionals. Worked on transforming the team from Classic Ops to DevOps, but also lead the Public Cloud transition.

Achievements:

  • Build a team of engineers
  • Introduce DevOps ways of working. (Infrastructure as code, automation, no Silos work)
  • Coach team of engineers to Agile methodologies
  • Involve Development teams on transformation
  • Migrate to cloud/adoption of cloud
  • Blameless working.
  • IaC and IaaS adoption through coaching of classic ICT engineers.

Interesting Picks

  • Terraform
  • Ansible
  • Puppet
  • AWS

earlier history:

details in my LinkedIn
  • 2014-2015 : Senior DevOps Engineer : Marktplaat (eBay) contract
  • 2013-2014 : Systems Engineer : Hyves (Telegraaf) contract
  • 2011-2013 : Systems Engineer : BackBase B.V.
  • 2008-2011 : Lead System Engineer (acting IT Manager) : ICOP
  • 2007-2008 : ICT Engineer: Coca Cola Hellenic contract
  • 2005-2007 : System Engineer : Topos Communications
  • 2001-2005 : Systems Administrator : Exodus SA (Exus)
  • 1999-2001 : Systems Administrator : IPNG Group

Skills & Tools

Cloud & Containers

  • Kubernetes
  • AWS
  • OpenStack
  • Azure
  • GCP

Automation

  • GitOps (ArgoCD, Helm etc)
  • Cloud Automation/Cloud IaaC
    Terraform, CDK, Pulumi and more
  • IAAC Tools
    Ansible, Puppet, Chef
  • Private and public Clouds
    AWS, Cloudstack, Openstack

Management Skills

  • Coaching/Mentoring
  • DevOps Tranformation
  • Planning
  • Delegating

Others

  • DevOps
  • GitOps
  • Docker
  • Agile
  • CI/CD
  • IaaS
  • SaaS
  • Presenting/Speaking
  • IaC

Language

  • Greek (Native)
  • English (Professional)
  • Dutch (A2 Level)
  • German (A1 Level)

Interests

  • IoT
  • R/C Helicopters