Ivan Kostin

About

I'm Ivan, founder of Nexspence and a TechLead DevOps with 12+ years in IT, first as a sysadmin, then in DevOps. I design and run delivery platforms end to end: infrastructure as code, CI/CD, Kubernetes, secrets and monitoring, on-prem on Proxmox and in AWS, GCP and DigitalOcean.

Most of what I build starts at work. A feature exists only in an enterprise licence, or doesn't exist at all, and the team keeps working around it. So I write the tool, test it on real infrastructure and release it, usually as open source.

I also take on custom development: software, internal tools and websites, built and shipped the same way as my own products.

Outside work I run my own infrastructure: VPS servers, Docker Compose, Tailscale, GitHub Actions and GHCR. I also build AI agents and LLM tooling, and ship small native apps for macOS and Android when something on my own desk annoys me.

How I work

• Check the facts first, then fix the root cause, not the symptom
• Everything as code, reviewed and reproducible
• Direct and to the point; mentoring is part of the job
• If it isn't released, it isn't done

Based in Vietnam · working remotely

Experience

TechLead DevOps · 12+ years in IT, from sysadmin to DevOps · on-prem and cloud

I own the delivery platform for a whole engineering org: pipelines, infrastructure, secrets and monitoring, plus mentoring the engineers who join the team.

Built myself

• VM provisioning pipeline on Proxmox with Terraform, Ansible and Jenkins, later replaced by a service I wrote in Go
• Golden images for every OS with Packer and Terraform
• HashiCorp Vault cluster on Raft in Kubernetes, with backups; secrets for pipelines and External Secrets
• Monitoring stack: Prometheus, InfluxDB, Grafana, Alertmanager, Blackbox, all in Kubernetes via Helm and Argo CD
• GitOps for service configuration: Terraform, Ansible, Vault, Argo CD
• Ansible role for K3s clusters with five network layouts: Cilium L2, Gateway API, Cilium Ingress, Istio, MetalLB, Calico or Flannel, kube-vip

Stack

IaC

Terraform · Ansible · Packer · Pulumi

Cloud

AWS · GCP · DigitalOcean · Proxmox on-prem

Kubernetes

Helm · Argo CD · Istio · Cilium · K3s · MetalLB · kube-vip

CI/CD

Azure DevOps / TFS · Jenkins · GitLab CI · GitHub Actions

Secrets

HashiCorp Vault · External Secrets

Observability

Prometheus · Grafana · InfluxDB · Alertmanager · Blackbox

Data

PostgreSQL · Patroni clusters

Platforms

Atlassian stack · Nexus · Azure DevOps Server

Code

Go · TypeScript · Rust · Swift · Kotlin · Python