Hi, I'm Okikiola — a Cloud & DevOps Engineer based in Lagos, Nigeria.
I came into this field a little sideways. My background is in Biochemistry, but somewhere along the way I got pulled toward infrastructure... the kind of problems where something breaks under load and you have to figure out why, or where a system needs to survive a traffic burst without falling over or double-charging someone.
That pull turned into two years of hands-on work: provisioning cloud environments on AWS and OCI, building CI/CD pipelines, and setting up the observability stacks that catch failures before a customer notices them.
What I work with day to day
- Infrastructure as Code: Modular Terraform across AWS and OCI, managing VPCs, IAM policies, and multi-node EKS clusters across projects.
- CI/CD: GitHub Actions workflows for automated linting, container builds, and deployment.
- Observability: Prometheus, Grafana, and Loki for metrics, logs, and alerting.
- Automation: Go and Python (Boto3) scripts for the unglamorous but necessary work, cleaning up orphaned cloud resources, enforcing tagging policies, automating backup rotations.
Why I'm writing here
I've started building deeper projects specifically to understand infrastructure problems at the system level, not just to add tools to a resume.
My most recent one, ledger-sentinel, is a simulated fintech payment gateway I built to work through idempotency locking (Redis SET NX EX), async settlement via RabbitMQ, and database consistency under concurrent load. It's the kind of system where "it worked in my test" and "it's actually safe against double-charges" are two very different claims, and I wanted to prove the second one, not just assume it.
I plan to write about this project and others like it, real architecture decisions, load-test numbers, what broke, and what I'd still need to add before calling any of it production-ready. I'd rather be upfront about the gap between a personal project and a production system than pretend it isn't there.
What I'm currently digging into
Right now I'm spending time on distributed lock contention patterns, Redis cache short-circuiting, and queue backpressure mechanics, mostly because ledger-sentinel showed me how much nuance sits behind "just add a distributed lock" once thousands of requests hit the same endpoint at once.
If you work in DevOps, SRE, or platform engineering, or you're navigating a non-traditional path into cloud infrastructure yourself, I'd like to connect. Always glad to talk through Terraform patterns, observability setups, or a race condition you've had to hunt down.
GitHub: github.com/aashiruu
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/okikiolaashiru
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