DevOps & Cloud Infrastructure Engineer
Durrell Gemuh
Multi-cloud DevOps engineer specialising in AWS and Google Cloud — building production-grade infrastructure, automation pipelines, and scalable platforms.
I work extensively with AWS and Google Cloud to design and run scalable,
production-ready infrastructure for modern engineering teams.
5+ years experience | Kubernetes | Terraform | GitOps | Observability |
Driving reliability | scalability | and cost efficiency.
Open to new opportunities & consulting engagements
AWS Community Builder
Cloud Operations Track
Cameroon · Remote Global
Durrell Gemuh
DevOps & Cloud Infrastructure Engineer · Community Builder · DevOps Educator
I'm a DevOps and Cloud Operations engineer with 5+ years of experience designing, automating, and operating infrastructure across AWS and Google Cloud.
I've worked with teams across the US, Europe, and Africa — helping organisations cut deployment times, reduce infrastructure costs, and build platforms their engineers are confident running in production.
Outside engineering, I founded NextGen Playground to help aspiring engineers gain real-world DevOps experience — because I believe the best engineers build systems and share knowledge.
5+
Years Experience
3K+
Sites Migrated
70%
Cost Reduction
DevOps Expertise & Tech Stack
5+ years designing, automating, and operating cloud infrastructure — across AWS, GCP, and hybrid environments.
Work Experience
DevOps and cloud infrastructure engineer with 5+ years delivering scalable systems, CI/CD automation, and cost-optimised deployments across AWS and GCP.
- CI/CD & Automation: Automated dependency analysis using Jenkins + Dependency-Track for proactive vulnerability detection and compliance checks.
- Kubernetes Management: Managed multiple K8s environments via ArgoCD — deployments, troubleshooting, debugging, and continuous cluster improvement.
- Cloud Pipeline & Monitoring: Used Azure DevOps Pipelines to deploy Terraform scripts provisioning AWS infra, Datadog monitors, APM services, and observability agents on VMs and K8s clusters.
- Secrets Management: Deployed HashiCorp Vault with Kubernetes to securely store secrets across namespaces with strict access policies.
- Security & Compliance: Remediated findings from AWS Security Hub and Trusted Advisor, aligning infrastructure to security and reliability best practices.
- Observability: Deployed CloudWatch agents and Datadog integrations across VMs, containers, and cloud services — enabling proactive alerting and incident response.
- Masterclasses: Lead live sessions covering GitOps, Prometheus & Grafana, Docker, Kubernetes, GitLab CI, and security — beginner to advanced.
- Project Facilitation: Guide students through real-world DevOps projects on infrastructure design, CI/CD pipelines, container orchestration, and monitoring.
- 1:1 Mentorship: Provide career guidance, troubleshooting support, and confidence-building for students pursuing DevOps roles.
- Evaluation: Assess progress through project reviews and hands-on exercises to ensure mastery of DevOps workflows and cloud technologies.
- Founded and lead DevOps at NextGen Playground — a tech education initiative upskilling aspiring DevOps Engineers, Cloud Engineers, and Linux Administrators.
- Deliver structured DevOps training programs, hands-on infrastructure labs, mentorship, and simulated internship experiences.
- Mission: bridge the gap between learning DevOps in theory and practising it in real-world environments.
- Built a collaborative learning community that helps engineers gain the confidence and skills to land engineering roles.
- Cloud Migration: Led migration of 3,000+ websites to AWS and GCP — 70% cost reduction, 95% improvement in scalability and reliability.
- CI/CD: Optimised pipelines cutting deployment times by 95% and accelerating time-to-market for new features.
- Architecture: Designed scalable cloud infrastructure handling peak traffic loads with high performance.
- Security & Monitoring: Implemented Cloudflare security and analytics integrations, reducing incidents by 25%.
- Cost Efficiency: Reduced operational expenses by 30% while maintaining high availability.
- Team Leadership: Led cross-functional team of developers, testers, and infra engineers on critical DevOps initiatives.
- IAM & Security: Managed AWS IAM users, roles, and policies with RBAC and company compliance standards.
- Cloudflare: Deployed company website on Cloudflare serverless architecture — integrated DDoS protection, SSL/TLS, and WAF, reducing security incidents by 40%.
- CI/CD: Built and maintained Jenkins + Terraform pipelines, streamlining deployments and automating infrastructure provisioning.
- Pipeline Overhaul: Revamped Jenkins + Maven workflows, eliminating 85% of manual tasks.
- Reliability: Enhanced network and cloud infrastructure, achieving 99.9% uptime.
- Cost Optimisation: Reduced quarterly AWS infrastructure costs by 63%.
- Internal Tooling: Built a tool enabling 170+ developers to deploy VMs in 60 seconds (down from 16+ minutes).
- K8s Reliability: Implemented health check system for Kubernetes clusters — MTTR reduced from 15 days to 11 hours.
- Automation: Built Terraform tooling to automate cluster creation, cutting setup from 2 hours to 20 minutes, integrated into CI/CD.
- Observability: Deployed Grafana dashboards for cluster health, resource utilisation, and performance metrics.
Looking for a DevOps Engineer?
I'm available for full-time roles, contract work, and consulting. Let's see how I can help your team ship faster and more reliably.
Currently Working On
Projects and initiatives I'm focused on delivering right now — click any to learn more or get involved.
Philosophy & Learning in Public
DevOps is more than tools. It's a mindset. Here's how I approach engineering — and why I share everything I learn openly.
Core Engineering Principles
Automation First
If a human is doing it more than twice, a machine should be doing it. Manual processes are technical debt in disguise.
Observability Everywhere
A system you can't observe is a system you can't trust. Metrics, logs, and traces aren't optional — they're how you sleep at night.
Infrastructure as Code
Infrastructure that can't be version-controlled, reviewed, and reproduced is infrastructure that will eventually fail you silently.
Continuous Improvement
Every incident is a learning opportunity. Every deployment is a chance to leave the system better than you found it. Blameless postmortems over blame culture.
Knowledge Sharing
Strong engineering cultures aren't built on individual brilliance. They're built on documentation, shared learning, and teams that make each other better.
Learning in Public
I don't wait until I'm an expert to share. I document my work, write about what I'm learning, and publish real-world problem-solving — because the best way to understand something deeply is to explain it clearly.
Topics I write about
DevOps Learning Resources
Curated guides, hands-on paths, and expert advice for engineers learning DevOps and cloud infrastructure — whether you're just starting or levelling up.
Want personalised guidance instead of self-study? Let's map out your path together.
Get Personalised Advice WhatsApp Me Join NextGen PlaygroundNextGen Playground
I founded NextGen Playground to solve a problem I kept seeing: engineers who understood DevOps in theory but had never operated anything real. The platform bridges that gap — through structured programs, live labs, mentorship, and a community of engineers building alongside each other.
100+
Engineers Mentored
Global Community
Real
Production-Grade Labs
Structured DevOps Programs
Curriculum-driven programs covering Linux, Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, CI/CD, and cloud platforms — in the right order, at the right depth.
Real-World Hands-On Labs
Not tutorials — actual infrastructure. Students deploy to cloud environments, break things, fix them, and leave with projects they can show in interviews.
1:1 Mentorship & Career Support
Personalised sessions covering career roadmapping, CV reviews, interview prep, and technical guidance — from someone actively working in the field.
Simulated Internship Experience
Engineers work on collaborative projects that mirror real DevOps engagements — with code reviews, deployment pipelines, and team coordination just like the job.
Collaborative Learning Community
A community of engineers learning alongside each other — asking questions, sharing solutions, and growing together. No one is stuck alone.
Ready to join or partner?
Whether you're an engineer looking to grow, a company wanting to sponsor, or an instructor wanting to collaborate — there's a place for you.
Visit NextGen Playground → Get in TouchCommunity & Mentorship
Engineering is a team sport. I actively give back to the community that shaped me — through mentorship, content creation, workshops, and collaboration with cloud practitioners around the world.
AWS Community Builder
Cloud Operations Track · Active MemberSelected as part of the AWS Community Builders program — a global network of cloud practitioners recognised for technical contributions and knowledge sharing. I work directly with AWS experts to improve the accuracy and depth of cloud content I create, and contribute to making AWS more accessible for engineers around the world.
Active Mentorship
1:1 · Group · Career GuidanceI actively mentor engineers transitioning into DevOps — from students building their first Terraform module to mid-level engineers pivoting into cloud infrastructure. Sessions cover career strategy, technical reviews, project walkthroughs, and honest advice about what actually gets people hired.
Workshops & Masterclasses
Live technical sessions on Kubernetes, CI/CD, Terraform, Prometheus, and cloud architecture — for individual engineers and engineering teams.
Technical Writing & Content
Deep-dive articles, real-world case studies, and practical AWS and DevOps guides — written for engineers who want substance, not surface-level summaries.
Speaking & Events
Available for conferences, meetups, and community events — on Kubernetes in production, CI/CD at scale, cloud cost control, and DevOps education in Africa.
My philosophy
"The best engineers are those who build systems and share knowledge."
Looking for a DevOps Engineer?
I'm available for full-time roles, contract work, and consulting. Let's see how I can help your team ship faster and more reliably.
Highlighted Projects
Real infrastructure built for real problems — cloud migrations, GitOps pipelines, Kubernetes environments, observability stacks, and IaC automation.
PECOS Data Extraction Pipeline
Production-grade AWS data pipeline extracting Medicare PECOS data with Lambda, S3, Glue, and Athena. Fully documented DevOps architecture with IaC provisioning and CI/CD deployment.
HashiCorp Vault HA on Kubernetes (Raft)
Deployed a production-ready Vault cluster in Kubernetes using Helm, Raft integrated storage, and a LoadBalancer service for UI access. Covers HA config, unsealing, and namespace-scoped secrets policies.
ArgoCD on GCP with Custom Domain & Auto TLS
Configured ArgoCD Ingress on Google Kubernetes Engine with a custom domain, automated TLS certificate issuance via cert-manager + Let's Encrypt, and Bitbucket repository integration for GitOps workflows.
Automated CloudWatch Agent via Terraform & SSM
Automated CloudWatch agent deployment to EC2 fleets using Terraform for provisioning and AWS SSM for agent configuration push — eliminating manual SSH access and enabling fleet-wide observability at scale.
Static Site Hosting: S3 + CloudFront + Route 53 + ACM
End-to-end serverless static website deployment on AWS — S3 origin, CloudFront CDN distribution, ACM SSL certificate, and Route 53 DNS — with GitHub-triggered CI/CD for automated deployments.
Datadog AWS Integration via Terraform & CloudFormation
Automated Datadog ↔ AWS account integration using Terraform with CloudFormation stack deployment — enabling full AWS metrics collection, log forwarding, and cloud-native observability without manual console steps.
Node-RED on Kubernetes with Secrets Management
Deployed Node-RED on GCP's GKE cluster with Kubernetes-native password management, persistent storage, and production-ready configuration — including secure credential rotation without pod restarts.
Terraform EC2 Provisioning with Custom User Data
Infrastructure-as-Code pattern for launching AWS EC2 instances with Terraform, injecting custom user data scripts for automated post-boot configuration — enabling fully hands-free, repeatable deployments.
Agentless Fleet Management via AWS SSM (No SSH)
Deployed monitoring and management agents to Windows and Linux EC2 fleets using AWS SSM and Parameter Store — zero SSH access, centrally managed secrets, and fully auditable remote command execution.
Looking for a DevOps Engineer?
I'm available for full-time roles, contract work, and consulting. Let's see how I can help your team ship faster and more reliably.
Latest Writing
Real-world DevOps — AWS service deep-dives, infrastructure war stories, Kubernetes guides, and lessons from production.
Looking for a DevOps Engineer?
I'm available for full-time roles, contract work, and consulting. Let's see how I can help your team ship faster and more reliably.
Let's Build Something Together
If you're looking for help with DevOps infrastructure, cloud architecture, or DevOps mentorship, feel free to reach out.
Location
Cameroon
Available globally (remote)