OPEN TO NEW ROLES

Ben
Leyder

// CLOUD & DEVOPS ENGINEER

Cloud & DevOps Engineer working across the full infrastructure stack — AWS, Terraform, Kubernetes, Docker, CI/CD pipelines. I build systems that are reliable, automated, and production-ready.

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Work that ships.

Real deployments. Real problems solved. Every project here was built end-to-end from scratch.

FEATURED   MAY 2026 — PRESENT LIVE ↗
Whetstone Platform — Production SaaS on AWS

Built for a real business. Running in production. A multi-tenant SaaS pricing tool designed, built, and operated end to end — ECS Fargate, Lambda, DynamoDB, Cognito, Stripe, and Terraform-managed infrastructure. Paying subscribers. Zero downtime deploys in under 4 minutes.

ECS Fargate Terraform Lambda DynamoDB Cognito Python GitHub Actions Stripe
<4m Deploy Time
0 Downtime Deploys
381 Products Priced
59 Issues Documented
5 Lambdas Running
PROJECT // 01   MAY 2026 LIVE ↗
Legacy System Migration to AWS

Migrated a WordPress site from aging on-premises infrastructure to AWS — provisioning the full target environment with Terraform, exporting the legacy database with mysqldump, importing into Amazon RDS MySQL in a private subnet, and validating the migration at the database layer before application cutover.

AWS Terraform RDS MySQL EC2 VPC Secrets Manager mysqldump IaC
18 AWS Resources
0 Data Loss
2 Proof Artifacts
PROJECT // 02   MAY 2026 LIVE ↗
Multi-Tier Kubernetes Deployment on AWS EKS

Provisioned a production-grade EKS cluster with Terraform, deployed WordPress and MySQL as a two-tier application via Helm, managed credentials through AWS Secrets Manager with the External Secrets Operator, and verified horizontal autoscaling under real load with Siege.

AWS EKS Terraform Kubernetes Helm AWS Secrets Manager MySQL HPA
127% Peak CPU Under Load
3 Max Replicas Scaled
94.4% Availability
PROJECT // 03   MAY 2026 LIVE ↗
Finding Solutions for Cloud Engineering Problems

A strategic analysis of five core challenges facing small cloud engineering teams — data source variability, proactive monitoring, resource constraints, documentation gaps, and CI/CD adoption. Grounded in AWS tooling with practical, business-aware solutions for each.

AWS CloudWatch CloudTrail Terraform Ansible Kubernetes Jenkins GitOps
5 Problems Analyzed
12+ Tools Covered
3 Deliverables
TECH CHALLENGE // 01   MAY 2026 LIVE ↗
End-to-End Cloud Deployment on AWS ECS

Provisioned a production-grade containerized application on AWS Fargate with full CI/CD automation, infrastructure as code, and GitOps — built from scratch in under 72 hours. Two parallel pipelines, 45 AWS resources, load tested at 250 concurrent users.

AWS ECS Fargate Terraform Docker Jenkins GitHub Actions GitOps ECR ALB
45 AWS Resources
99.9% Availability
2 CI/CD Pipelines
TECH CHALLENGE // 02   MAY 2026 LIVE ↗
Container Orchestration & CI/CD on AWS EKS

Provisioned a production-grade Kubernetes cluster on AWS EKS with Terraform, deployed a personalized portfolio app via Helm with live cluster data from the Kubernetes Downward API, and automated deployment with Jenkins and a GitOps pipeline using GitHub Actions and ArgoCD.

AWS EKS Terraform Kubernetes Helm Jenkins ArgoCD HPA AWS ALB
69 AWS Resources
2 CI/CD Pipelines
4 Max Node Scale
TECH CHALLENGE // 03 MAY 2026 LIVE ↗
Infrastructure as Code with Terraform and Ansible

Provisioned AWS infrastructure from scratch using Terraform — EC2, S3, IAM roles, and security groups — then configured a live Nginx web server using Ansible. Zero manual server interaction. Full infrastructure lifecycle from code to running web page and back.

Terraform Ansible AWS EC2 AWS S3 IAM Nginx IaC Amazon Linux 2023
7 AWS Resources
3 Ansible Tasks
0 Manual Server Touches
Technical foundation.

Built through hands-on deployment, not just coursework.

Cloud & Infrastructure
  • AWS ECS Fargate & EKS
  • VPC, Subnets, NAT Gateway
  • Application Load Balancer
  • ECR, IAM, CloudWatch
  • EC2, RDS, S3
  • AWS Trusted Advisor
DevOps & Automation
  • Terraform (IaC)
  • Ansible
  • Jenkins Declarative Pipelines
  • GitHub Actions / OIDC
  • GitOps / Argo CD
  • Kubernetes & Helm
Containers & CI/CD
  • Docker & Dockerfiles
  • Docker-in-Docker (DinD)
  • Helm chart authoring
  • CI/CD pipeline design
  • Webhook automation
  • Zero-secret auth (OIDC)
Kubernetes
  • EKS managed node groups
  • Horizontal Pod Autoscaling
  • ALB Ingress Controller
  • Kubernetes Downward API
  • ArgoCD GitOps sync
  • Metrics Server
Monitoring & Reliability
  • CloudWatch alarms & logs
  • CloudTrail auditing
  • ECS & EKS auto scaling
  • Load testing (siege)
  • Pre-destroy lifecycle hooks
  • Incident post-mortems
Development & Tooling
  • Node.js / React / Express
  • AWS CLI
  • Git & GitHub
  • Linux system administration
  • JSON / REST APIs
  • Groovy (Jenkinsfile)
Who's building this.
Ben Leyder
// CLOUD & DEVOPS ENGINEER
LOCATION Indiana, US
FOCUS AWS / DevOps / IaC
PROJECTS 6 live (and growing)
STATUS Available

// Background

I'm a Cloud & DevOps Engineer with a hands-on focus on AWS infrastructure, automation, and production-grade deployment patterns. My approach is straightforward: build real things, encounter real problems, and solve them — because that's where the actual learning happens.

My background is blue-collar and trade-based — culinary arts, long-haul trucking as an owner-operator, and commercial water well pump maintenance — before making a deliberate move into cloud engineering. The same mindset that keeps a pump system running at 2am is what I bring to infrastructure: methodical, reliable, and built to last.

My work spans the full infrastructure stack — from provisioning VPCs and EKS clusters with Terraform, to building parallel CI/CD pipelines with Jenkins and GitHub Actions, to containerizing applications with Docker and deploying them with Helm on Kubernetes. My projects range from a load-tested ECS Fargate deployment to a full EKS cluster with GitOps automation via ArgoCD.

Beyond deployment, I think carefully about why infrastructure succeeds or fails — not just the technical side, but the process and people dimensions. Understanding both is what separates systems that hold up from ones that don't.