Senior Technical Manager

Anil P. Thomas

18+ years of enterprise IT infrastructure · OpenStack · Azure · AWS · GCP · OpenShift
📍 Aluva, Ernakulam, Kerala, India

RHCE ITIL Certified Oracle OCP OpenStack Certified OpenShift Certified

View Experience Get In Touch

18+

Years Experience

50+

Engineers Led

40%

Downtime Reduced

Certifications

A little about me

"Technology is not just my profession — it is my passion, my classroom, and my way of giving back."

Over nearly two decades in the field, I have come to believe that the greatest privilege in technology is not just solving complex problems — it is sharing what you have learned so others can stand on your shoulders.

I approach every new technology — whether it is a new cloud platform, a container orchestration tool, or a storage architecture — with the same curiosity I had on day one. That hunger to understand things deeply, not just make them work, is what has kept me growing through every shift the industry has taken.

I mentor engineers not by giving answers, but by teaching them how to find them — how to read logs methodically, think in systems, and build the confidence to tackle the unknown. Because the best lesson I ever learned in tech is this: the problem in front of you is never as scary as the one you haven't seen yet.

🌱 Lifelong Learner 🤝 Mentor & Coach 🔍 Curiosity-Driven ⚙️ Systems Thinker 🌍 Multi-Cloud Navigator

03 — Experience

Professional Experience

Mar 2017 — Present

Armia Systems

Senior Technical Manager

Directed end-to-end management of servers co-located across remote data centres, maintaining consistent high performance and near-zero unplanned downtime.
Spearheaded a full-scale migration from dedicated server infrastructure to a scalable OpenStack private cloud environment, reducing capital expenditure significantly.
Architected and administered OpenStack services (CLI & API) integrated with Ceph distributed storage for resilient, scalable data management.
Managed hybrid cloud workloads across OpenStack, Microsoft Azure (VMs, VNet, NSG, Azure AD), and AWS — ensuring seamless interoperability and consistent security policy enforcement.
Evaluated and onboarded DigitalOcean and Hetzner cloud environments for cost-optimised workloads, configuring networking, firewalls, and automated provisioning pipelines.
Defined infrastructure standards and best practices, mentoring a team of engineers to elevate operational efficiency and service quality.
Collaborated with cross-functional stakeholders to align IT strategy with business objectives, driving continuous service improvement initiatives.

Key Achievements

Delivered high-availability solutions that reduced unplanned system downtime by 40%.
Optimised Ceph storage architecture, cutting data redundancy by 30% while improving I/O performance.

Oct 2009 — Sep 2015 | Mar 2016 — Feb 2017

VIPoint Solutions

Team Manager — Linux Infrastructure

Led and mentored a team of 20+ engineers delivering 24/7 Linux server support for a diverse global client portfolio spanning dedicated, VPS, and cloud-hosted environments.
Served as the primary escalation authority for L3/L4 incidents, providing expert-level root cause analysis and proactive preventative measures.
Administered hosting, database, and bespoke server environments across dedicated infrastructure as well as AWS and early cloud platforms — hardening security posture and optimising performance across the fleet.
Established SLA frameworks and monitoring protocols that ensured consistent service delivery against agreed performance benchmarks.

Key Achievements

Enhanced server throughput by deploying Varnish and XVarnish caching, significantly boosting web application response times.
Reduced mean incident response time by 50% through the development of advanced automation and alerting scripts.

Sep 2015 — Mar 2016

Cognizant Technology Solutions

Linux Administrator & Operations Manager

Managed CI/CD pipelines using TeamCity and Puppet, overseeing GIT repository integrity across multiple concurrent software projects.
Directed testing environment operations, ensuring seamless integration, deployment, and quality assurance workflows.
Provided operational oversight and technical guidance to development and QA teams on infrastructure dependencies.

Dec 2006 — Oct 2009

GVO Labs

Senior Server Administrator

Executed large-scale web server migrations and critical data restoration projects with minimal service interruption and zero data loss.
Designed and implemented multi-layered security frameworks including firewalls, intrusion detection, and access controls.
Administered shared and dedicated Linux hosting environments serving thousands of end-users globally.

04 — Strengths

Additional Strengths

☁️

OpenStack Administration & Troubleshooting

Extensive hands-on experience administering and troubleshooting production-grade OpenStack environments — managing Nova, Neutron, Keystone, Glance, and Horizon via CLI and REST API.

🐇 RabbitMQ (RMQ)

Management of OpenStack message broker — monitoring queues, diagnosing consumer lag, resolving service communication failures.

🗄️ Ceph Block Storage (RBD)

Provisioning RBD volumes as persistent backend for Cinder — pool config, snapshots, performance tuning for VM workloads.

🪣 Ceph Object Storage (RGW)

Deploying Ceph RADOS Gateway as S3/Swift-compatible object store — configuring buckets, access policies, Swift integration.

📦 Ceph Distributed Storage

Cluster architecture, OSD management, CRUSH map config, replication policies, and capacity planning for HA data durability.

🌐 Neutron Networking

Tenant networks, routers, floating IPs, security groups — troubleshooting L2/L3 and OVS/OVN virtual switch problems.

🖥️ Nova & Glance

VM lifecycle, flavours, host aggregates, availability zones — and Glance image registry for golden images and snapshots.

🚢

OpenShift Administration & Kubernetes Expertise

Certified Red Hat OpenShift Administrator with hands-on experience deploying, managing, and troubleshooting OpenShift container platforms — proficient in Kubernetes core concepts and OpenShift-specific extensions.

⌨️ OpenShift CLI (oc)

Advanced usage of oc exec, oc logs, oc describe — rollouts, scaling, multi-cluster management.

☸️ Kubernetes Core

Pods, Deployments, ReplicaSets, StatefulSets, DaemonSets, Services, Ingress, ConfigMaps, Secrets, PVCs — full workload lifecycle.

🔧 OpenShift Resources

Routes, DeploymentConfigs, ImageStreams, BuildConfigs, Templates, and Operators — leveraging OpenShift beyond standard Kubernetes.

🔐 RBAC & Security

RBAC, service accounts, Security Context Constraints (SCCs), and network policies for least-privilege multi-tenant clusters.

📦 Helm Deployments

Deploying applications via Helm charts — managing release lifecycles and integrating with GitOps pipelines.

🐳 Container Management

Building and managing container images with Podman & Docker — private registries, Dockerfile optimisation, OpenShift integration.

💻

Expert Bash Scripting

Authored extensive Bash automation scripts for system health monitoring, log analysis, scheduled maintenance, and incident auto-remediation — dramatically reducing manual intervention across large server fleets.

🔍

Cross-Platform Troubleshooting

Proven ability to diagnose complex issues across Linux (RHEL, CentOS, Ubuntu, Debian) and Windows Server — covering networking faults, performance bottlenecks, kernel issues, Active Directory, and IIS.

📦

HashiCorp Packer

Building automated, reproducible machine images and templates across OpenStack, AWS, and VMware — maintaining versioned golden image pipelines with embedded security hardening and configuration baselines.

🔐

Security Hardening & Compliance

Iptables, CSF, Apache/Nginx hardening, SSH lockdown, intrusion detection, and vulnerability patching — ensuring infrastructure meets security compliance across multi-tenant hosting environments.

⚡

Performance Optimisation

Varnish/XVarnish caching, web server tuning (Apache, LiteSpeed, Nginx), MySQL query optimisation, storage I/O profiling, and kernel parameter tuning — delivering measurable throughput gains in production.

🔄

CI/CD & DevOps Tooling

Managing CI/CD pipelines with TeamCity, configuration management with Puppet and Ansible, and version control workflows via Git — enabling infrastructure-as-code practices across development and production.

🗂️

Version Control & Source Code Management

Experienced across the full SCM spectrum — from daily version control operations to self-hosting enterprise-grade platforms for multi-team environments.

Git

Advanced usage including branching strategies (GitFlow, trunk-based), merging, rebasing, tagging, and custom hooks for workflow automation.

SVN (Subversion)

Repository administration and maintenance, including successful migrations from SVN to Git with full history preservation.

GitLab — Self-Hosted Installation & Maintenance

End-to-end installation, configuration, and maintenance of self-hosted GitLab — CI/CD pipelines, Runners, user access, group permissions, SSL, upgrades, backup & restore for multiple projects and teams.

GitHub & Bitbucket

Collaborative development, pull request workflows, and integration with CI/CD toolchains.

🌍

Multi-Cloud Environment Experience

Hands-on experience managing workloads across multiple public and private cloud platforms — selecting the right environment for each workload based on cost, performance, compliance, and geographical requirements.

🔵 Microsoft Azure

Azure VMs & Compute — provisioning, scaling, and managing virtual machines. Azure Networking — VNet design, NSG rules, subnets, and peering. Azure Active Directory — user management, SSO, group policies, and enterprise identity integration.

🟠 Amazon Web Services (AWS)

EC2 instance management, S3 storage, VPC networking, IAM policies, and security groups. Experience migrating on-premises and dedicated server workloads to AWS cloud infrastructure.

🔴 Google Cloud Platform (GCP)

GCP compute and infrastructure management — VM instances, networking, firewall rules, and cloud storage — supporting workload deployments and hybrid integration with on-premises environments.

🌊 DigitalOcean

Droplet provisioning, managed databases, Spaces object storage, VPC networking, and firewall configuration — leveraged for cost-effective hosting of client workloads and development environments.

🏠 Hetzner Cloud & Dedicated

Hetzner Cloud servers, dedicated root servers, and private networking — used for high-performance, cost-optimised European hosting deployments with custom OS installations and network configurations.

🔒 Cross-Cloud Security & Governance

Enforcing consistent security policies, IAM practices, network segmentation, and compliance standards across heterogeneous multi-cloud environments — reducing attack surface and ensuring audit readiness.

🛡️

High Availability & Disaster Recovery

HA clustering, automated failover architectures, and comprehensive backup and DR strategies — achieving 40% reduction in unplanned downtime and ensuring business continuity for mission-critical services.

Anil P. Thomas

Profile Summary

Core Competencies

Professional Experience

Additional Strengths

Professional Certifications

Education