About

My name is Roman Levchenko and I am a former Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (2014-2022; silently kicked because of nationality), VMware vExpert (2017-2019) and Senior Cloud & DevOps Engineer working for a leading international IT and development company (US-based).

I was also a leader of the Microsoft TechNet Community in the past and awarded multiple times as the most valuable contributor. In 2018, I became the author of System Center Virtual Machine Manager Cookbook that has been distributed worldwide by Amazon and Packt Publishing. For more details about the book, please check this out

My current focus is on design and implementation of complex CI/CD principles primarily based, but not limited to, on Azure, Kubernetes, Docker and different types of open-source DevOps tools. Below you can find my overall experience*, current tech stack, certifications (only the most recent) and technical reviews:

OS: Windows Server (11+ years), Linux (4+ years)
Clouds: Azure (5+ years), AWS (2 years), Yandex Cloud (>1 year)
CI/CD: Azure DevOps, Jenkins, GitHub, GitLab, Git SCM (4+ years)
Containers: Docker (w/docker-compose), Service Fabric, Kubernetes w/Helm (4+ years), Swarm, Kaniko (>1 year)
Database: PostgreSQL, MongoDB (>1 year), SQL Server AlwaysOn/FCI (4+ years), ClickHouse (>1 year)
Automation and IaC: PowerShell, Terraform, Azure ARM, Packer (3+ years), Bash, Python (>1 year)
Virtualization: Hyper-V (w/Shielded VMs, VMM, Azure Pack) and Failover Clustering (7+ years), VMware vSphere (> 1 year)
Core infrastructure: services based on Active Directory, PKI, DNS, DHCP, WSUS, WDS, IIS, NLB, FS (including resource forests and advanced domain structures; 4+ years), Traefik, HashiCorp Vault, Keycloak, NGINX (> 1 year)
Remote Desktop Services: Windows RDS and VDI (2+ years)
Unified Communications: Lync/Skype For Business, PBX and Audiocode gateways, side-by-side migrations (> 1 year)
Server Systems: IBM Flex, Cisco UCS, HP ProLiant, Dell PowerEdge/VRTX and Supermicro. Installation, configuration and support (3+ years)
Storage Systems: HP MSA, EMC VNX, IBM StorWize, JBODs and software-defined storage (Storage Spaces Direct). Installation, configuration and support (3+ years)
Network devices: Cisco, HP, NetGear, TP-Link (VLANs, LACP and other things that might be required by virtualization platform). Installation, configuration and support (3+ years) * with years of considerable hands-on practice only

Ongoing project stack (starting from October, 2022): CentOS, GitLab CI, Jenkins, Nexus, Puppet, Kafka, RabbitMQ, ELK, Hadoop, Accumulo, MariaDB, Clickhouse, Redis, Kubernetes, Docker Compose, Prometheus, Grafana, HA Proxy, NGINX