Vinod Kumar Dhanavath

DevOps & Cloud Engineer · Ottawa, Canada · 7 min read

The beginning — Hyderabad, 2014

I grew up in Hyderabad, India, and graduated with an MSc from Osmania University in 2016. Like most engineering graduates, I had theoretical knowledge but no real-world experience with the tools that actually matter in industry.

My first job at Jio in 2017 changed everything. I was thrown into a fast-moving telecom environment where we were deploying hundreds of microservices and the infrastructure had to scale to hundreds of millions of users. There was no time to learn slowly — you either figured it out or you didn't.

Learning the hard way — Jenkins at 2am

At Jio I built my first real CI/CD pipelines using Jenkins, Gradle, and Bitbucket. We were running Kubernetes and ECS to orchestrate containers for microservices that served millions of users daily. I learned Prometheus and Grafana not from documentation but from debugging live production alerts at 2am.

That experience — being on call, owning deployments end to end, watching your pipeline fail in production — is worth more than any certification. It's where I really became a DevOps engineer.

The kind of late-night debugging sessions that shaped how I think about reliability

Growing up — Mahindra Finance & enterprise scale

Moving to Genpact and Mahindra Finance was a different world — regulated BFSI workloads, compliance requirements, and the complexity of enterprise-scale Kubernetes on OpenShift. I started understanding that cloud engineering in finance is about much more than deployment speed. It's about governance, audit trails, and zero tolerance for downtime.

This is where I first built Azure Data Factory pipelines for analytics and learned to think about infrastructure as something you declare, version, and audit — not something you click together in a console.

Moving to Canada — Ottawa, 2023

Ottawa — my home since 2023, and one of Canada's fastest-growing tech hubs

Moving to Canada was the biggest leap. New country, new industry norms, and a job market that values certifications and regulated-industry experience very specifically. I joined Intact Insurance as an AWS DevOps Engineer and had to ramp up fast on HIPAA compliance, SOC 2 audits, and the specifics of migrating insurance workloads to AWS.

It was also the first time I ran a full on-premises to AWS migration — using SMS, DMS, and Snowball to move live workloads with minimal downtime. That project is now one of my most-visited case studies.

National Bank — where I am now

Since January 2025 I've been working as an Azure DevOps Engineer at National Bank of Canada — one of Canada's Big 6. The work involves AKS migrations, Terraform governance frameworks, Azure AD identity at enterprise scale, and CI/CD pipelines that deploy to production with zero downtime.

Working in regulated Canadian finance has taught me that cloud engineering at this level is about trust. When a bank's systems go down, people can't access their money. The bar for reliability, security, and documentation is higher than anywhere else I've worked.

Collaboration is at the heart of every successful cloud delivery

Things I've learned along the way