IT Architect with hands-on experience since 2005, former Microsoft employee, delivering international flagship projects for Core Infrastructure since 2011, and specializing in Azure Cloud since 2015.
[see my rich history of projects for more details on my roles, technologies, and project scales]
I help global enterprise-scale customers on their cloud adoption journey by designing and implementing effective, reliable, scalable, and secure solutions.
Typical roles: Technical / Cloud / Platform / Infrastructure / Systems / Solution Architect, Consultant, DevOps Team Lead
Experience level: Senior Manager
Competencies:
# Non-technical
- Estimating, planning, and delivering complex, large-scale projects
- Building trusted relationships with customer technical teams up to C-level
- Technical leadership, interviewing, hiring, and developing project team members
- Collaborating productively with external teams, partners, and vendors
# Azure Infrastructure Solutions
- architecture patterns and practices [well-architected & cloud adoption framework, agile, DevSecOps, SDLC]
- governance [landing zones, role model, naming, policies]
- compute [virtual machines, scale sets, big compute, HPC, auto-scaling]
- advanced networking [ExpressRoute, VPN, routing topologies, VWAN, high availability]
- network security [firewalls, NVA, NSG, DMZ, segmentation, zero trust]
- management & automation [ARM, Bicep, Terraform, PowerShell, Bash, DSC, CI/CD, DevOps tools]
- operational & security monitoring [Log Analytics, Sentinel]
- identity & access management [Azure AD, ADFS, hybrid AD integration, RBAC, conditional access]
- backup & disaster recovery [IaaS, PaaS, BCDR, SLA, SLO]
- datacenter migration [Azure Migrate]
- advanced workloads [Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD), Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), SAP HANA]
# Legacy Technical Acumen
- Core Infrastructure Solutions based on Windows Server and Linux platforms [AD/DNS & supporting services, Failover & HA Clusters, File & Print Services, SQL Server clustering]
- Server and Presentation Virtualization: networking, management, high availability, site resiliency, scalability, deployment, migration, and hardware sizing [Hyper-V, IaaS solutions, Remote Desktop Services]
- Network Infrastructure: network devices & services, routing, and remote access [Windows Server components, firewalls, network virtual appliances & active hardware devices]
- Unified communications: messaging, voice & video, and conferencing [Lync, Exchange]
- Hardware: server and storage sizing, configuration, diagnostics, and servicing [HP, IBM, …]
Technical leadership in lighthouse Azure Infrastructure projects.
Customer-facing: gathering requirements, delivering design workshops, handling technical discussions, presenting solutions, and serving as a trusted advisor up to the CTO.
Internally: ensuring system designs and implementations meet requirements; maintaining integrity, scalability, and security; keeping team spirit levels high.
Business development: pre-sales, responding to RFP and RFI, suggesting project team compositions, contributing to solution accelerators, learning, and development materials.
[refer to my project history for details]
Provided technical leadership in enterprise-scale Cloud Infrastructure projects across Europe.
Delivered the largest Core Infrastructure projects in the CEE region, from pre-sale to customer handover.
Pre-sales, planning, designing, and implementing IT infra projects for medium companies.
[typical projects: server infrastructure, virtualization with high availability, Exchange, and Lync]
Designed, implemented, and maintained the whole IT infra of a medium-sized company.
[100+ workstations, 20+ servers, VoIP, IP-cameras, active network devices]
Administered the IT infra of the biggest chemical factory in the region. Developed a real-time monitoring solution for a production process.
The list of projects below is not complete and only includes projects I selected as most representative for my experience. Projects I wanted to highlight are marked with [!]. Please ask me if you are interested to see the complete list of my projects.
Client: Leading investment asset management firm founded by industry legend
Role: Cloud Platform Architect for Networking
As a member of the Critical Cloud Infrastructure team, I focused on the Adoption of Azure Virtual WAN
Duties included advising on Azure Virtual WAN architecture, multi-regional traffic routing with 3 ExpressRoute Direct locations, migrating from traditional Hub-and-Spoke model, quality testing, monitoring, and collaborating with Microsoft for quality assurance. Developed scripts for network connectivity testing during migrations and contributed to IaC codebase for operational monitoring setup. During migrations, served as networking SRE, conducting live testing and status monitoring to minimize business disruption.
Keywords: high-security environment, Infrastructure as Code, quality gates, GitLab, Jira + Confluence, Containerized Deployment Agents, VS Code, PowerShell, REST API, custom Python solution for IaC deployment, ARM, Bicep, Terraform, Git
Customer: Louis Dreyfus Company (global merchant and food processing)
Role: Systems Architect for Azure Infrastructure Design
Working as a member of the CCoE team of technology area architects on enabling cloud capabilities for migration of existing assets and new workloads.
Keywords: design reviews and advisory, knowledge transfer, POCs, landing zones structure, Citrix ADC/NetScaler, storage, backup databases, supporting new deployments and migrations.
Customer: Louis Dreyfus Company (global merchant and food processing)
Role: Systems Architect for Azure Landing Zone Design
Assessing existing customer portfolio, Designing and Implementing Landing Zones for the future migrations of customer's applications, contributions to planning future datacenter migration & CCoE streams. Working with a diverse team of 10+ tech folks on the EPAM side and 20+ on the Customer side.
Keywords: multi-regional hub-and-spoke networking with core and extranet NVAs, Landing Zones design adopting and reworking Microsoft reference architecture, deployment automation with Terraform, deployment and integration with Azure China Soverign Cloud, designing Cloud Center of Excellence for customer.
Customer: Amadeus (global travel technology company)
Role: Stream Lead for Advanced Networking Desing
Review and contribute to the design of a highly complex network solution in Azure Cloud which includes multiple routing domains encapsulation on the same redundant ExpressRoute circuits.
Keywords: ExpressRoute redundancy, Arista and Palo Alto NVAs, F5 load balancers, VXLAN, Kubernetes, CNI, Calico.
Customer: AXA (global insurance company)
Role: Lead consultant
Planning and Executing a Proof of Concept for various scenarios of virtual machine migrations with the Azure Migrate tool in a highly tight network security environment.
Keywords: Azure Migrate, private endpoints, availability zones, agentless & agent base discovery and migration, Windows, Linux
Customer: First Abu Dhabi Bank (biggest bank in UAE region)
Role: Lead consultant for Azure Infrastructure
Delivering core infrastructure and landing zones for the future migrations of bank’s applications.
Keywords: advanced hub-and-spoke networking with core and extranet NVAs, ExpressRoute private & Microsoft peerings with redundancy, governance with Enterprise-Scale, monitoring with Log Analytics, high security standards and compliance with policies and regulatory certifications, deployment automation with ARM and Terraform. Work alongside Modern Service Management and Windows Virtual Desktop teams of MCS.
Business impact: enabling customer's migration to Azure cloud and future projects for MCS.
Customer: Diageo (worldwide beverages brand with £12.8bn sales revenue, 28k+ employees, HQ in UK)
Role: Lead consultant for Azure Infrastructure
Primed by Microsoft Consulting Services and working alongside SAP specialist partner, we have been delivering a 12-month project to migrate the entire company's SAP estate of 17 different landscapes and over 100 physical servers from IBM AIX & Oracle to Windows, SQL Server & SAP HANA on Azure.
Keywords: SAP, HANA, IBM AIX, Oracle, Windows, SQL Server, Linux, giant size Azure Virtual Machines (Mv2), Backup, Site Recovery, High Availability with Load Balancers, Pacemaker and secondary regions, Log Analytics monitoring, NetApp files, ExpressRoute, Hub and Spoke networking, deployment automation, security, governance, and compliance.
Business impact: successful migration of a complex, 10k+ cores estate of business applications with little downtime and no business interruption, over 50% of performance improvements, significant improvement in reliability, decreased over-head, increased manageability, reduced costs for Diageo and strong services and Azure revenue for Microsoft.
Customer: Nokia Networks (150k+ employees, HQ in Finland)
Role: Lead consultant for Azure Infrastructure
Design and build a greenfield Azure Infrastructure to provide the Minimum Viable Product to start lift-and-shift migrations from the legacy environments. Working on a tight schedule in Agile style using the DevOps tools.
Keywords: Azure DevOps, CI/CD, deployment automation via pipelines, Git repos, product documentation in wiki, working with backlog, subscriptions and management model, naming, resource policies, advanced networking (ExpressRoute, Hub-Spoke topology, Fortinet NVA), advanced ARM templates with conditional deployments, provisioning Windows/Linux VMs with custom scripts, monitoring and logging with Log Analytics, storing secrets in KeyVault, compliance with Security Center recommendations.
Business impact: built a platform to host potentially ~10000 cores of compute resources
Customer: MITA (Malta Information Technology Agency, provides IT services for all Malta government)
Role: Lead consultant for Azure Infrastructure
Design and build the Azure Infrastructure to provide the base for lift-and-shift migration of existing on-premises services for a government organization. Keywords: subscriptions and management model, naming, resource policies, multiple regions, advanced networking (VPN, ExpressRoute, Hub-Spoke topology, Fortinet NVA), deployment automation.
Business impact: built a platform to host potentially ~5000 cores of compute resources
Igor worked in my team during our joint time at Microsoft Consulting Services unit. Throughout this period Igor transitioned from working on the local accounts set towards international engagements. Igor quickly adjusted his approach to meet and exceed expectations of Enterprise Customers across Germany, France, UK and other locations. Igor completed multiple cloud design and migration projects and established himself as a strong expert and contributor to the lighthouse cloud projects across EMEA.
I have been working with Igor for a while and he is a very strong professional profile. He has fantastic technical ability mixed with a great set of soft skills that allows him to manage customers very well. Igor is customer obsessed and always committed to the results and outcomes. Great teamwork and innovative spirit, Igor is an architect role model!
Igor was the lead solution architect (I was the customer) on the project where we broke ground with an innovative solution to a business problem. Igor was able to deliver an advanced technical solution which was performant and stable which the client used as a leap board to mass cloud migration. He also ensured that when he left the project there was sufficient skills in the team to maintain and develop the solution going forward. I recommend Igor without reservation
Igor is the best consultant I have ever worked with. He brings competence, knowledge and calm to complex projects and situations. His ability to clearly communicate with customers, his field experience and his technical expertise are just exceptional. Bring him to your team and he will make you successful. I highly recommend him for any technical leadership roles.