Hello!

I'm Sai Harsha Vemula

DevOps Engineer

LinkedIn

Name: Sai Harsha Vemula

Job Role: DevOps Engineer

Experience: 5+ Years

Address: Tuscaloosa, Alabama

Skills

Java
Python
Shell Scripting
AWS
Kubernetes
Terraform
SQL
Web Development

About

About Me

DevOps Engineer with 5+ years building and running production AWS infrastructure. At the University of Alabama's Alabama Water Institute I own the cloud platform behind a national-scale hydrologic forecasting system that supports the NOAA NextGen National Water Model — with a focus on security, compliance, and cost.

Day-to-day I write Terraform, Ansible, and Python. My security stack is CloudTrail, GuardDuty, Security Hub, and IAM Access Analyzer for detection; Trivy, Grype, and SonarQube in CI for prevention. Primarily AWS, with some Azure.

Containers with Docker, Kubernetes, and Helm; delivery with GitHub Actions, Argo CD, Jenkins, and GitLab; observability with CloudWatch, Prometheus, Grafana, and the ELK stack. I've shipped multi-architecture (x86/ARM64) build pipelines, automated compliance workflows on AWS Config, and cut monthly AWS spend by 30% through targeted EBS, EC2, and S3 audits.

I like working at the seam between research and production — where scientific code has to run reproducibly, on real infrastructure, at national scale. That's what CIROH is, and it's why I'm there.

Resume

Resume

DevOps Engineer, 5+ years — cloud infrastructure automation, security compliance, and CI/CD for research and enterprise environments.

Download Resume

Experience


July 2025 - Present

DevOps Engineer

University of Alabama – Alabama Water Institute | Tuscaloosa, Alabama, USA

  • Automated research infrastructure provisioning using Terraform and AWS (EC2, S3, Lambda, Step Functions), reducing deployment time by 45%.
  • Deployed a detection stack — CloudTrail, Security Hub, GuardDuty, IAM Access Analyzer — supporting institutional security-compliance audits.
  • Established automated vulnerability scanning (Trivy, Grype, SonarQube) integrated into CI/CD workflows for continuous security validation.
  • Developed multi-architecture Docker build pipelines (x86/ARM64) using GitHub Actions and AWS CodeBuild.
  • Cut monthly AWS spend by 30% through targeted audits of EBS volumes, EC2 right-sizing, and S3 storage-class transitions.
  • Enhanced observability with CloudWatch metrics, dashboards, and alerting for workflow executions and AWS health events.
  • Integrated AWS Config and Trusted Advisor for real-time compliance monitoring across multi-account environments.
  • Designed scalable CI/CD pipelines for scientific modeling workloads, enabling reproducible, event-driven research automation.


2021-2023

Associate Software Engineer - DevOps

Vitrana, Inc.

  • Tuned Kubernetes manifests and rollout automation, cutting deployment time by 20% and reducing rollout-related downtime by 30%.
  • Designed AWS VPCs with segmented subnets, CIDR allocation, and NACLs for network isolation.
  • Deployed Prometheus and Grafana monitoring, reducing incident response time by 40% and lifting service uptime to 99.9%.
  • Implemented Terraform IaC for automated infrastructure provisioning, eliminating configuration drift.
  • Added Trivy and SonarQube scans to CI/CD; managed AWS RDS, ElastiCache, WAF, and Secrets Manager.
  • Adopted Argo CD for GitOps delivery, cutting Kubernetes deployment-drift incidents by 30%.

2020-2021

Software Engineer Intern

Vitrana, Inc.

  • Integrated Azure AD for secure identity management with SSO and MFA implementation.
  • Automated monitoring and deployment workflows with Bash and Python, cutting manual runbook steps by 40%.
  • Developed AWS Lambda scripts for EBS snapshots, ECR cleanup, log management, and dynamic EC2 scaling.
  • Contributed to cloud-native migration of legacy applications, reducing maintenance costs by 15%.
  • Designed IAM roles and Kubernetes RBAC policies for secure access control and compliance.
  • Tuned 300+ Docker deployments to cut runtime errors by 25%; automated configuration with Ansible.
  • Implemented real-time dashboards (AWS QuickSight, Redshift, Glue) and ELK stack for centralized logging.



Education


2023-2024

Master in Computer Science

University of Missouri-Kansas City

Kansas City, Missouri

2016-2021

M Tech Integrated Software Engineering

Vellore Institute of Technology

Vellore, Tamil Nadu, India

How This Portfolio Is Built

A fully serverless AWS stack: private S3 origin behind CloudFront on a Route 53 domain, with a resume-aware chatbot powered by Amazon Bedrock (Claude Haiku 4.5) wrapped in Bedrock Guardrails. Running under one dollar a month.

Read the full architecture write-up

Projects

Projects

Below are some of the projects I have worked on, focusing on automation, deployment, and analytics in the software engineering domain.

NGEN-Datastream - National Water Model (CIROH)

Led DevOps and infrastructure automation for NextGen National Water Model Research Datastream, managing 68,000+ successful hydrologic model executions. Architected multi-environment Terraform deployment pipeline with AWS Step Functions orchestration across 21 VPUs. Developed GitHub Actions CI/CD workflows for automated AMI creation, testing, and validation with health check auto-rerun capability and cost protection thresholds. Built Docker images for multi-architecture deployment, configured IAM policies, and implemented CloudWatch monitoring with S3 lifecycle policies for cost optimization.

View Project Slides →

Data Analytics Platform Deployment

Designed and deployed a scalable AWS-based data analytics platform using Apache Spark and Elasticsearch, reducing processing time by 40% through automated pipelines. Implemented Infrastructure as Code (IaC) with Terraform to provision and manage AWS resources, resulting in a 30% reduction in infrastructure costs.

MediFlow – Distributed Healthcare System

Engineered a microservices-based healthcare platform using Java and Spring Boot, focusing on scalability and fault tolerance. Containerized microservices with Docker and deployed them on Kubernetes, ensuring seamless scaling and load balancing across the application. Automated CI/CD pipelines with Jenkins and GitLab, leading to a 50% reduction in deployment time.

Achievements

Certifications & Awards

Here are some of the recognitions I have received for my contributions and expertise in the field of DevOps.

HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate

HashiCorp's Terraform Associate exam — validates hands-on knowledge of IaC concepts, state and module design, and provisioning real resources with Terraform.

View Certification

HashiCorp Terraform Certification Badge

AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate

AWS's Associate-level architecture exam — covers designing secure, scalable, and cost-efficient systems on AWS, from IAM and VPC design through storage, compute, and networking trade-offs.

View Certification

AWS Solutions Architect Certification Badge

Microsoft Certified: Azure Fundamentals

Foundational Azure certification — covers Azure core services, identity, governance, and security fundamentals.

View Certification

Microsoft Certified Fundamentals Badge

GitHub Actions Certification

GitHub's Actions certification — CI/CD workflow authoring, reusable workflows, secrets and OIDC federation, and custom action development.

View Certification

GitHub Actions Certification Badge

Conferences

Conference Presentations

Here are my research presentations and poster sessions at major conferences.

CIROH DevCon 2026 — Salt Lake City

CIROH CyberInfrastructure · NextGen Research DataStream (NRDS) · NextGen In A Box (NGIAB)

Spent a few days in Salt Lake City with the CIROH community — a room full of the people building the National Water Model, all working through the same hard problems together. Presented our work on CIROH's CyberInfrastructure, the NextGen Research DataStream (NRDS), and NextGen In A Box (NGIAB).

A few things that stuck with me: the gap between "research code" and "production system" is where most of the interesting DevOps work lives; cost and reliability aren't afterthoughts in scientific computing, they're what make the science repeatable; and the hallway conversations outlasted most of the slides. Grateful to the CIROH and Alabama Water Institute teams, and to everyone who stopped by to dig into the infrastructure side of things.

View NRDS Project Slides

Presenting at CIROH DevCon 2026 in Salt Lake City
CIROH DevCon 2026 session

American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting 2024

Research to Operations Hybrid Cloud (R2OHC) Platform

Poster session at AGU Fall Meeting 2024 on the R2OHC Platform. As part of the CIROH CyberInfrastructure team at the University of Alabama, I helped build a multi-cloud stack spanning AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, and on-premises HPC for hydrologic modeling. The platform serves 28 consortium institutions and runs compute-intensive NextGen water simulations via containerized workflows (Docker/Singularity), managed JupyterHub environments, and IaC.

AGU Conference Poster Preview

Click to view full poster PDF

View LinkedIn Post Download Poster

My Blogs

Explore My Articles

Here are some of my recent blog posts where I discuss various topics related to DevOps, cloud technologies, and software engineering.

Read My Blogs

Testimonials

What People Say

Here are some testimonials from my colleagues and mentors who have worked closely with me.

Avnish Joy

DevOps Team Manager at Vitrana

"I had the pleasure of working closely with Sai Harsha in my team as a DevOps Engineer. He consistently demonstrated his expertise in areas such as CI/CD pipelines, automation, and cloud infrastructure management. Sai is technically proficient and an excellent team player, always willing to collaborate and share knowledge. His proactive attitude and dedication ensured our projects were completed efficiently and successfully."

Tharun Yerramreddy

Team Lead of DevOps Team at Vitrana

"As Sai Harsha's lead, I am consistently impressed by his expertise in AWS, DevOps, Kubernetes, Shell Scripting, and GitLab. He has been instrumental in managing complex systems and implementing seamless CI/CD processes. His technical expertise and problem-solving capabilities make him an invaluable asset to any team."

Abibalaji

Team Lead of Java Team at Vitrana

"Sai Harsha is an exceptionally talented and dedicated DevOps Engineer. His outstanding work in formalizing our pipeline architecture significantly improved our workflows. Sai is a team player with strong communication skills and a commitment to delivering results. I am confident Harsha will bring excellence and value to any organization he is associated with."

Shanmukh Sridhar

Python Developer at Vitrana

"I had the pleasure of working with Harsha, where he consistently demonstrated exceptional skills in cloud engineering and DevOps practices. His expertise in AWS, Docker, GitLab, Terraform, and CI/CD pipelines made him a go-to person for automation. Harsha excels in managing complex projects and delivering scalable, efficient solutions. He is also a fantastic team player."

Vanshika Bhatt

DevOps Engineer at Vitrana

"I have had the opportunity to work with Harsha in his role as a DevOps Engineer and can attest to his technical expertise in GitLab, AWS, Kubernetes, and Terraform. His meticulousness and ability to find creative solutions to complex problems have been a valuable asset to our team."

Contact

Contact Me

Below are the details to reach out to me!

Address

Kansas City, Missouri

Contact Number

+ 816-614-4801

Email Address

vemulasaiharsha@gmail.com

Download Resume

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