Chimbu Chinnadurai
Senior Cloud Architect II
☸️ Battle-tested Kubernetes Operator 🤫
I've probably debugged a Kubernetes issue in more time zones than I care to count. Based in London, I help engineering teams across EMEA get their clusters to behave — and actually understand why they misbehaved in the first place.
I write, speak, and guest on podcasts about all things cloud-native. Away from the terminal: I enjoy cooking almost as much as simplifying overly complex systems.
- Kubernetes
- GCP
- AWS
- Kubestronaut
- Cloud Native
- Networking
- AI
- DevOps
- FinOps
My Certifications
AWS Certified Advanced Networking – Specialty
AWS (last renewed/obtained: Jan 11, 2020)
Renewable as of January 11, 2023
CNCF Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA)
CNCF (last renewed/obtained: Feb 2, 2026)
Expires Feb 2, 2028
CNCF Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD)
CNCF (last renewed/obtained: Feb 9, 2026)
Expires Feb 9, 2028
CNCF Certified Kubernetes Security Specialist (CKS)
CNCF (last renewed/obtained: Mar 16, 2025)
Expires Mar 16, 2027
CNCF Kubernetes and Cloud Native Associate
CNCF (last renewed/obtained: Apr 14, 2024)
Expires Apr 14, 2027
CNCF Kubernetes and Cloud Security Associate (KCSA)
CNCF (last renewed/obtained: Apr 23, 2024)
Expires Apr 23, 2027
CNCF Kubestronaut
CNCF (last renewed/obtained: Apr 29, 2024)
Expires Dec 31, 2034
CNCF Prometheus Certified Associate (PCA)
CNCF (last renewed/obtained: Oct 4, 2022)
Renewable as of October 4, 2025
Tetrate Certified Istio Administrator
CNCF (last renewed/obtained: Nov 9, 2022)
Renewable as of November 8, 2025
Google Cloud Authorized Trainer
Google (last renewed/obtained: Oct 25, 2022)
Expires Dec 31, 2049
Google Cloud Professional Cloud Architect
Google (last renewed/obtained: Dec 30, 2025)
Expires Dec 30, 2027
Google Cloud Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer
Google (last renewed/obtained: Jan 22, 2026)
Expires Jan 22, 2028
Google Cloud Professional Cloud Network Engineer
Google (last renewed/obtained: Jun 1, 2026)
Expires Jun 1, 2028
Google Cloud Professional Cloud Security Engineer
Google (last renewed/obtained: Mar 11, 2024)
Renewable as of April 1, 2026
Hashicorp Certified Terraform Associate
Hashicorp (last renewed/obtained: Aug 21, 2023)
Renewable as of August 21, 2025
Hashicorp Certified Vault Associate
Hashicorp (last renewed/obtained: Feb 10, 2023)
Renewable as of February 10, 2025
Hashicorp Certified Vault Operations Professional
Hashicorp (last renewed/obtained: Feb 10, 2023)
Expires Dec 31, 2050
Other Certificate
Other (last renewed/obtained: Mar 6, 2024)
Expires Mar 6, 2027
What my customers say
Brilliant support and super fast
appspace.com · Jun 2026
What I'm writing
GKE Active Buffer: Eliminate Node Provisioning Delays
GKE's new Active Buffer feature eliminates node provisioning delays by maintaining warm capacity, reducing scale-out latency from minutes to seconds.
Kubernetes DRA GPU Scheduling: End Node Hunting for AI Workloads
Kubernetes DRA eliminates manual GPU node hunting by introducing intelligent, request-based allocation for complex AI workloads with mixed hardware requirements.
GKE Native Support for Custom Metrics: Smarter Autoscaling Beyond CPU and Memory
Modern cloud-native applications rarely scale perfectly using CPU or memory metrics alone. Many workloads are driven by signals like…
What I've open-sourced
- 62
ChimbuChinnadurai/gcp-keda-gke-event-driven-autoscaling-demo
Built after explaining KEDA one too many times in customer calls.
- 5
ChimbuChinnadurai/gke-gcp-grpc-gateway-api-with-istio
gRPC server streaming service running on GKE with istio sidecar
- 0
ChimbuChinnadurai/terraform-aws-gcp-multicloud
Because 'multi-cloud' sounds great in boardrooms but gets chaotic the second routing enters the chat.
- 4
ChimbuChinnadurai/trading212-ISA-portfolio-tracker.git
A full-featured web application that fetches your Shares ISA positions from the Trading212 API and displays them in a rich, interactive dashboard.
- 11
doitintl/aws-eks-sample-templates
Templates for spinning up EKS Lens via Helm, minus the configuration headaches.
- 1
ChimbuChinnadurai/gitlab-oidc-with-gcp-workload-identity-federation
The secure, passwordless blueprint for authenticating GitLab CI/CD pipelines with GCP using WIP
Webinars I've hosted
Istio Ambient Mesh GA: Sidecar-less Service Mesh on Kubernetes
Top Kubernetes Updates of 2024: Gateway API, Pod Resizing, and More
Scaling Kubernetes Workloads with KEDA Event-Driven Autoscaling
Customers I've helped
PlayHQ Optimizes Multi-Tenant Kubernetes Costs
“Every customer has unique usage patterns. Manual resource optimization simply didn't scale—we needed automation to ensure every customer, regardless of size, had right-sized infrastructure without consuming our team's capacity.”
— Brad Quinn, Lead Platform Engineer, PlayHQ
Optimove cuts execution times by up to 60%
“We are thrilled with DoiT International's expertise to migrate Optimove to Google Cloud with ease and efficiency. Their expert guidance and seamless migration allowed us to scale our services effortlessly and focus on what we do best – delivering emotionally intelligent marketing interactions.”
— Amir Gabay, VP of Technical Operations
Talks I've given
Unlock Powerful Progressive Delivery with Gateway API and Argo rollouts
K8SUG UK Meetup · London, UK · Aug 28, 2024
Simplified and Cost-Efficient GKE Node Management with NAP
PerfectScale · Remote · May 22, 2025
ILT - Google Kubernetes Engine(GKE)
Google Cloud (Authorized Trainer) · Jan 1, 2025
ILT - Google Cloud Fundamentals
Google Cloud (Authorized Trainer) · Feb 1, 2024
Come work with me
Open roles I'd love to refer you for
If it's running in production, it deserves to be understood — not just monitored.
Cloud Intelligence™
Delivering the true promise of the cloud
Others surface recommendations. Cloud Intelligence™ makes them happen. Closed-loop optimization with Forward Deployed Engineers embedded.
Commitments
Auto-cover with Savings Plans
Kubernetes
Right-size pods from usage
Spot
Shift to spot safely
Data Lakes
Tune Snowflake & BigQuery
month-to-date
$56,500end-of-month
$128,200last 12 weeks
Connect with the tools used by your teams
All clouds. All SaaS.
Fast-growing companies run on Cloud Intelligence™
Savings on Kubernetes
Audited Savings
“PerfectScale gave us what dashboards and meetings never could: a safe, automated way to reduce Kubernetes waste without risking uptime. We now treat optimization as governance, not guesswork.””
Thomas Comtet
Senior Staff Engineer, SNCF
Field Experts Across Every Time Zone
DoiT experts across regions and specialties, helping teams solve cloud challenges worldwide.
- UTC-86 FDEsAWS Core Services×3AWS DevOps×2AWS Networking×2
+1
- UTC-75 FDEsAWS×2Networking×2AI×1
- UTC-66 FDEsAI×1Aurora×1AWS×1
+1
- UTC-525 FDEsAWS Core Services×5AWS DevOps×5AWS Security and Identity×5
+20
- UTC10 FDEsAWS×3AI×2AWS Core Services×2
+5
- UTC+121 FDEsSecurity×4AI×3AWS×3
+16
- UTC+213 FDEsAWS Core Services×4AWS Networking×4AWS Serverless×4
+8
- UTC+82 FDEsAgentCore×1Agentic AI×1Aurora×1
- UTC+92 FDEsAWS Core Services×2AWS DevOps×1AWS Networking×1
- UTC+102 FDEsAWS Kubernetes×1AWS Serverless×1Google Cloud DevOps×1
- UTC+114 FDEsAWS Databases×2AWS×1AWS AI/ML×1
From the Field
Cloud Engineering Beyond the Happy Path
Talks, insights, and signals for engineers navigating alerts, scaling pain, and platform complexity.
Cloud Masters
Cloud Masters distills patterns from 4,500+ customer engagements into short, tactical episodes for practitioners.
Applied FinOps Show
Field notes from FinOps practitioners on engineering pushback, stalled savings, and allocation models that break under real multicloud workloads.
AI Signal Daily
Daily AI signal, minus the launch spam — curated for cloud and AI practitioners at DoiT.
Cloud Intelligence™ Metrics
Live and unfiltered — right now, not last quarter.
What customers are saying
Chris was awesome. He was so kind and attentive. I can definitely tell he's extremely talented as well.
Today
I'm very satisfied with doit!
Today
AWS needs some improvement...
Today
I'm a bit disappointed by the quality of the support here. For once, I didn't have the reflex to "ask AI" before asking to DoIt support (this one is on me, my apologies). Still, there was clearly a drift between expectations and reality here: - I expected more qualitative answers (in terms of documentation and troubleshooting) as I assumed DoIt know better the perfectscale exporter than us, since it is integrated with their platform; - The reality is I received an answer that is basically GenAI answer from the support (recognizable by all the "em dashes" (—). In addition to that, that didn't answered all my questions: how it basically works (exporter and cr-manager, as we were in the dark for this issue), confirm we were referring the right helm chart values, etc. Don't get me wrong: I'm fine with the usage of GenAI, even for support (we do as well). But IMO it should be done and reviewed by experts, a mix of human and GenAI is the best for quality. I generally have very good contact with DoIt support and it is the first time I experience this. I'm sure this feedback will help contributing to the improvement though !
Today
Michelle walked me through the change on a call, just so I could have a second set of eyes. Thanks!
Today
Come from AWS Enterprise Support, was not sure what to expect. The DoiT specialist was able to provide a satisfactory resolution to the case as well as follow up information from AWS.
Today
AWS should focus more on root cause analysis.
Today
Dhiraj was great help. Thank you!
Today
While the DoIT support team did a great job trying to push the case forward, the service from AWS support has been completely unacceptable. It took five days to unblock a CloudFormation stack due to an internal bug in their managed service. Despite waiting more than three months for a refund, AWS has deflected all responsibility and refused to account for the resources that remained running solely because of this issue. We are being penalized twice: first, by having to bear the consequences of a known AWS bug, and second, by seeing no value from the hundreds of thousands of dollars we spend on Enterprise Support.
Today
I can't emphasis enough how much Hannes helped us here! We had a tricky, persistent GCP issue that had been bugging our team for months. Hannes jumped in, pinpointed the root cause almost immediately with our provided data, and suggested the exact quick and long term fixes. This single interaction saved us so much future headache.
Today
Arian was excellent as always. He set up a call and explained the different options to us as well as the impacts of each option, and offered to raise a bug ticket with Google.
Today
We manage to validate the problem (after the initial mis-interpretation) and validate potential fixes with GKE.
Today
Instant turnaround and offer for meeting even though it was not needed after all, thanks Bogdan
Today
Gerardo was a superb point of contact.
Today
Una respuesta muy completa y detallada que resuelve nuestras dudas
Today
Awesome proactive reach out and guidance for a successful upgrade.
Today
Quick and precise answer to resolve our issues/questions. Thanks a lot!
Today
Joseph provided a comprehensive, prompt response and a friendly follow up on a call. Thanks for your help
Today
Alfred pointed us to the right solution right away. Thanks!
Today
Support response time was fast, instructions were clears and worked as expected.
Today
Your cloud infrastructure, always at its best
Optimization, automation, expertise. In one platform