Team API

Andrei Aleksandrov

Expert and consultant. Helps improve engineering practices and processes in platform and product teams.
Over 7 years helping companies develop engineering culture, processes and practices. Worked at Evil Martians, Arenum Games, Mafin, Express 42. Helped improve engineering culture, processes and practices in such companies as Tinkoff, Avito, MTS, inDrive, Exness, Wild Apricot, Raiffeisen Bank, Yandex, Mafin. He has spoken at AgileDays, TechLeadConf, DevOpsConf, DevOops, Whale Rider, DevOps Moscow, DevOps Novosibirsk.
Projects:
  1. As an expert in Enabling.team he analyzed SRE practices in FoodTech company. He prepared recommendations on how to reduce the load on the SRE team, how to involve development in on-call, and what services the platform currently lacks to spread SRE practices in the company.
  2. Improved SRE practices at Evil Martians. Described the company using Team Topologies, this helped to understand and identify the limitations of this approach. Organized a meet-up and invited a communication expert to discuss ways to resolve conflicts with colleagues and customers. Participated in sales, formulating SRE as a product and vision for future platform. Engaged in R&D of different tools and solutions for customers. Worked on analytics on team workload from each client to optimise costs. Maintained customer infrastructure, responded to incidents, and reduced costs in the cloud. Stack: AWS, GCP, Kubernetes, Terraform, ArgoCD, Flux, Prometheus, Loki, Grafana, Redis, Postgres, Ruby On Rails and Go services.
  3. Improved SRE practices at Arenum Games. Formed a platform based on bare metal k8s (Kubespray). Moved part of legacy infrastructure to k8s. k8s was deployed via kubespray, AWS was managed via Pulumi. Implemented monitoring and incident response, practiced troubleshooting and writing postmortems. After he left, development took over cloud management with Pulumi.
  4. Led platform team at Mafin. Applied the Team Topologies approach to identify team dysfunctions and plan platform development. The result was a platform that gave other teams complete independence from the operations and first line support teams. Kanban implementation made the platform team's and contractors' timelines predictable. Talked about this experience at TechLead Conf 2020. Platform capabilities in Mafin: test environment creation via button in GitLab with all services and infrastructure, add new microservices to environements, access and secret management for all environments, transparent state of services. Tech stack: k8s bare metal, Kafka, Zookeeper, Redis cluster, Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, Jaeger, ClickHouse. Platform stack: k8s on GCP, GitLab, Ansible, Pulumi.
  5. As an expert in Express 42 analyzed engineering practices and development processes at Tinkoff. Prepared recommendations on platform development, conducted CustDev of development teams, highlighted limitations of current processes in the teams and offered solutions. Implemented Infrastructure as Code practice at MTS on Ansible. Refactored large Chef installations at Wild Apricot and 1 OFD. Built dev environments at Wild Apricot's platform team on Chef and Terraform. Implemented Continuous Delivery at MTS on Ansible on Linux and Windows servers.
  6. He has been involved in training. Conducted public and corporate trainings on Docker, ELK, branching models and Continuous Delivery at Raiffeisenbank and Alfa Bank. Developed a 2-day training "Continuous Delivery in Kubernetes", led an online course "DevOps practices and tools" on OTUS.
  7. Experimented with writing k8s operators in Go, created CLI tools in Ruby and Python for client projects.

Social networks:
- Telegram
- Twitter
- Facebook
- GitHub

Conference talks and publications:
- Team dysfunctions and Team Topologies at AgileDays 2023 (RU)
- Workshop team topology for platform teams at DevOops 2021 (RU)
- Workshop team topologies at DevOpsConf 2021 (RU)
- Pulumi at DevOps Moscow meetup (RU)
- Calico internals. Architecture and capabilities (RU)
- Continuous Integration as practice at DevOps Novosibirsk meetup (RU)
- Platform teams: benefit or harm at TechLeadConf 2020 (RU)
- Using Thiago Forte's Knowledge Management Practices at KnowledgeConf (RU)
- Why Trunk Based Development is the best branching model at DevOps Moscow meetup (RU)
- Continuous Delivery at the beginning of 2019 (RU)
- How to start DevOps transformation at Whale Rider 2018 (RU)

DevOps Deflope podcast episodes:
- 053 - Interview with Alik Kurdyukov about the role of technical lead (RU)
- 052 - Remote work. Part 2 (RU)- 051 - Remote work. Part 1 (RU)- 049 - Dev and Ops interaction at Skyeng (RU)- 048 - Интервью с Leon Fayer про DevOps и Business
- 046 - Interview with Igor Tsupko about knowledge management and Performance Review (RU)
- 045 - Interview with Akhmed Sheriev about the transformation of development teams (RU)
- 044 - Interview with Evgeny Rossinsky about creation of new products in IVI (RU)
- 042 - Interview with Anton Isanin about transformation to Alfa-Bank (RU)
- 041 - Interview with Evgeny Peshkov about Domain-Driven Design (RU)
- 040 - Interview with Leon Fayer about business monitoring (RU)