Project: Fault management (#Cox Communications)
Over the past several months, I’ve been part of a three‑person team executing a critical migration of multiple microservices from a traditional, self‑managed Kubernetes environment to Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). The project involved several parallel modernization efforts:
Java upgrade – moving to the latest version and resolving all compatibility issues across the services.
UI overhaul – rewriting the user interface from scratch and integrating it with the backend services.
Secrets management – transitioning from legacy secret handling to HashiCorp Vault, with secure access from the new GKE cluster.
Infrastructure migration – re‑architecting the existing Kubernetes setup into a fully compatible, production‑ready GKE cluster.
Environment‑specific configurations – setting up SSL certificates, host mappings, UI routing, and URL configurations across development, QA, and production environments to ensure secure, consistent, and isolated deployments.
I took complete ownership of the infrastructure migration track. This included designing and provisioning the GKE cluster, ensuring full compatibility with our existing workloads, and orchestrating the smooth transition of all microservices. I also led the configuration of environment‑specific settings: managing SSL termination and certificate lifecycle, defining host and URL mappings per environment, and aligning UI integration points with backend services for dev, QA, and prod. I handled the entire lifecycle – from writing and building the cluster configuration to deploying services and validating the environment – all while maintaining zero‑downtime operations.
Beyond the technical execution, I found deep satisfaction in the end‑to‑end process: writing infrastructure as code, automating builds, managing deployments, and tailoring configurations to each environment’s needs. It has been an intense but incredibly rewarding learning experience, strengthening my expertise in cloud‑native migrations, GKE, multi‑environment management, and production Kubernetes operations.
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