About

Balasankar "Balu" C is a Senior Distribution Engineer at GitLab, with over 7 years of relevant experience in the field of DevOps. He is a FOSS evangelist and contributor, and has served as a Debian Developer, Mozillian, and GNOME Foundation Member (Emeritus). Balu is interested in DevOps positions, with experience in build, package, and release positions. He is also experienced in Automation and Orchestration technologies, as well as Kubernetes and Cloud Native application development and migration of legacy systems to Cloud Native. At GitLab, Balu has held various positions, including Distribution Engineer and Junior Software Engineer. As a maintainer of the omnibus-gitlab project, he has helped make GitLab easy to install on various systems and platforms. He has implemented automation for various workflows, such as automating development of builder environments, release of AWS AMIs, Marketplace listings, collection and publishing of component licenses, and more. As part of the Distribution team, Balu has developed helm charts for deploying GitLab to K8s environments, implementing different features to ensure the smooth deployment/upgrade of the instance and making new features usable. He has also started and implemented basic automation around various PeopleOps tasks, such as onboarding new members, announcing new hires and anniversaries, and more. This work has proven to be of great use to the PeopleOps team, has grown a lot since, and resulted in PeopleOps hiring a Full-Stack engineer to take it forward. Balu still acts as a maintainer of the codebase and helps out the engineer in developing ideas and direction. Balu holds a Master of Technology (M.Tech.) in Computer Science and Engineering from Adi Shankara Institute of Engineering and Technology, as well as a Bachelor of Technology (B.Tech.) in Computer Science and Engineering from the same institution. He also holds a Higher Secondary degree in Computer Science from Sree Sarada Vidyalaya. Balu's tech stack includes AWS, Kubernetes, and DevOps.