I’m Alain Igban — a Cloud Engineer with CKS, CKA, RHCE, and Azure Solutions Architect Expert certifications. I spend most of my time in Kubernetes clusters, usually ones that are doing something they shouldn’t be.
I started in information security in the Philippines, deploying SIEM solutions and tuning threat detection for enterprise clients at Ion Management Solutions. That’s where I learned that most security problems are infrastructure problems in disguise.
In the UAE, I moved into systems engineering at ValueMentor — building CI/CD pipelines for SOC tooling, creating a Kafka-based ETL that enriched event data with MISP threat intelligence, and migrating 100+ Linux servers from VMware to a Proxmox cluster. I codified the whole thing with Ansible, Terraform, and Packer.
At Core42, I became the person who gets called when a customer’s Kubernetes cluster is behaving strangely. I’ve handled networking failures, storage mount issues, certificate rotations, and control plane quirks across EKS, AKS, and on-prem clusters for over 300 environments. I also led a team of 12 support engineers and built a 500-article knowledge base.
Most of my work sits where Kubernetes, infrastructure automation, and security overlap. I run workloads on EKS and AKS, manage everything with Terraform and Ansible, and monitor with Prometheus and Grafana. I’ve published Ansible roles on Galaxy and test them with Molecule against Proxmox VMs before shipping.
I debug like I homelab — methodically and with a lot of logs. When an I/O error took down half my storage array, it took 8 hours of xfs_repair and a SATA cable swap to fix. When an accidental domain disjoin broke Podman user namespaces, I traced the issue through SubID mappings to recover the database. That’s the kind of troubleshooting I bring to work.
Cloud Engineer, Platform Engineer, or Kubernetes Engineer roles in NSW — teams running production Kubernetes at scale, building internal developer platforms, or managing multi-cloud infrastructure. Preferably somewhere the problems are interesting and the on-call rotation is fair.