I’m Xiang Zhu, a Cloud and DevOps Engineer. I bring 16 years of enterprise IT experience, including consulting roles at Thoughtworks and Accenture, to infrastructure design, automated delivery and systems operations.
These project summaries draw on the project records I have retained. They highlight selected responsibilities and contributions, rather than the full scope of my work on each engagement.
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Platform support, migration and CI/CD delivery
Supported Azure/AKS and development teams while leading implementation of an environment migration and Bamboo-to-GitLab rebuild. Reworked scripts, Ansible and Vault integration, guided a colleague and coordinated dependencies through validation and migration completion.
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Platform design and business analysis
Contributed Kubernetes and OpenShift expertise to a banking platform spanning VMs and containers. Jointly designed predictable IP addressing for business applications, then connected operational needs with monitoring features through business analysis for operations systems and delivery-team coordination.
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AWS/EKS platform support and GitOps delivery
Supported AWS/EKS infrastructure, provisioned resources with Terraform and worked with the existing Argo CD and GitHub Actions GitOps setup. My Terraform work included modules intended to support disaster recovery.
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AWS SRE support and Terraform refactoring
Refactored Terraform modules and built service modules for a recovery environment while supporting an AWS platform. Together with a colleague, I assessed platform risks and prioritised operational improvements.
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Secrets management and CI/CD on OpenShift
Migrated gopass credentials to Vault on OpenShift, reducing password synchronisation from over an hour to seconds for more than 200 users. Implemented GoCD Pipeline-as-Code and supported service migrations, platform operations and handover.
· About three months
DevOps consulting and delivery improvement
Advised on delivery measurement, deployment standardisation and traffic switching. Compared database migration approaches for parallel releases, weighing consistent change histories against the bank’s monthly release practices, compatibility needs and adoption effort.
How I explain the choices behind the work. Start with a question, then follow the answer into the project context and follow-up discussion.
Health Promotion Board · CI/CD
Shared functions became reusable GitLab steps, while task-specific work stayed separate.
China Merchants Bank · Networking
Address takeover followed confirmation that the old host was shut down and removed from the environment.
Story Filler · Managed hosting
Managed services reduced platform work. Application configuration, credentials and service connections still needed care.
Infrastructure · Architecture · Delivery
A learning application.
From local platforms to verified cloud delivery.
From a local prototype and Kubernetes lab to managed cloud hosting: architecture choices, tested recovery and security checks behind the deployment.
Read the case study View delivery recordOne project. Different operating models.
AI engineering · Evaluation · Operations
Does another review step
produce a better knowledge article?
A master's capstone comparing single-pass prompts and an agent review loop for technical support records. Model orchestration, recoverable batch runs, evaluation design and interpretation of results.
Read the case study View experiment results
69 selected technical records · Offline research
Saved scores, checked interpretations.
HPB · CI/CD · Implementation & technical questions
How I rebuilt the delivery workflow: Ansible-managed runners, reusable scripts, security checks and separate builds across SIT, UAT and production.
Explore the deep diveAWS · Resilience
My approach to recovery goals, warm standby, database takeover and controlled failback on AWS, illustrated with EKS, ALB and RDS PostgreSQL.
Explore the designArticles on engineering practice, architecture decisions and lessons from building and operating systems.
How a Trivy scan stopped a Story Filler release, and how dependency updates, a smaller runtime image and API smoke checks helped verify the fix without weakening the security gate.
Reflections from AI research and engineering practice on human judgment, inspectable outputs and the checks needed to support a decision, with verification as part of the working process.
A follow-up on separate frontend and backend delivery paths in GitHub Actions, with Terraform for cloud configuration and remote state. The current case study adds implementation details and verified release records.
The original migration account follows a personally maintained application from a Kubernetes lab to Cloud Run, Neon and static hosting, weighing infrastructure control against the work of operating it alone.
I use Codex across planning, implementation, debugging and documentation. This snapshot shows the rhythm of that work; the Story Filler case study shows how I check the results.
Selected software-project workspaces
– · Auckland time
Recorded Codex work cycles across selected software projects. Snapshot updated 3 November 2026; the final day is partial.
Aggregated locally from retained Codex metadata for explicitly selected software-project workspaces. A turn is one recorded assistant work cycle; a follow-up starts another turn. Planning and documentation in those workspaces are included. Other workspaces, including job-search tasks, are excluded.
Only top-level turns with a start time and a finished, failed or interrupted status are counted. Forked copies are deduplicated by turn ID; subagent work is excluded. Dates use each turn’s start in Pacific/Auckland. This export omitted 0 duplicate records, 0 records without a start time and 2 nonterminal records. An active day has at least one qualifying turn; zero means no qualifying record was retained.
I generated this snapshot from retained records in the selected local workspaces. It reports daily activity in recorded turns; the project pages show the resulting code, decisions and verification. The public export contains dates and aggregate counts. Conversation content and workspace details remain local.
Download the aggregate snapshot (JSON) · Read the counting script
| Date | Turns |
|---|---|
| 2026-09-05 | 1 |
| 2026-09-06 | 12 |
| 2026-09-07 | 26 |
| 2026-09-08 | 32 |
| 2026-09-09 | 29 |
| 2026-09-10 | 40 |
| 2026-09-11 | 39 |
| 2026-09-12 | 17 |
| 2026-09-13 | 31 |
| 2026-09-14 | 20 |
| 2026-09-15 | 0 |
| 2026-09-16 | 4 |
| 2026-09-17 | 0 |
| 2026-09-18 | 0 |
| 2026-09-19 | 0 |
| 2026-09-20 | 4 |
| 2026-09-21 | 1 |
| 2026-09-22 | 7 |
| 2026-09-23 | 0 |
| 2026-09-24 | 0 |
| 2026-09-25 | 2 |
| 2026-09-26 | 0 |
| 2026-09-27 | 17 |
| 2026-09-28 | 29 |
| 2026-09-29 | 0 |
| 2026-09-30 | 0 |
| 2026-10-01 | 0 |
| 2026-10-02 | 31 |
| 2026-10-03 | 14 |
| 2026-10-04 | 17 |
| 2026-10-05 | 29 |
| 2026-10-06 | 7 |
| 2026-10-07 | 17 |
| 2026-10-08 | 3 |
| 2026-10-09 | 25 |
| 2026-10-10 | 0 |
| 2026-10-11 | 19 |
| 2026-10-12 | 25 |
| 2026-10-13 | 6 |
| 2026-10-14 | 8 |
| 2026-10-15 | 5 |
| 2026-10-16 | 6 |
| 2026-10-17 | 21 |
| 2026-10-18 | 29 |
| 2026-10-19 | 7 |
| 2026-10-20 | 4 |
| 2026-10-21 | 35 |
| 2026-10-22 | 3 |
| 2026-10-23 | 21 |
| 2026-10-24 | 10 |
| 2026-10-25 | 0 |
| 2026-10-26 | 15 |
| 2026-10-27 | 10 |
| 2026-10-28 | 7 |
| 2026-10-29 | 4 |
| 2026-10-30 | 4 |
| 2026-10-31 | 6 |
| 2026-11-01 | 5 |
| 2026-11-02 | 18 |
| 2026-11-03 | 6 |
About the author
My background spans 16 years in enterprise IT (2008–2024), including consulting, systems engineering and project delivery. My work connects cloud platforms, container orchestration, delivery automation and day-to-day operations.
At Thoughtworks (2018–2024), I worked as a Senior Consultant on infrastructure and DevOps projects for clients including Singapore’s Health Promotion Board, Daimler AG, China Merchants Bank and SadaPay. Earlier, at Accenture (2016–2017), I was seconded to Huawei as an Infrastructure Consultant. I contributed Kubernetes expertise to the design of the HiCloud container platform and helped the development team implement it.
I have completed a Master of Software Engineering at Yoobee Colleges in Auckland. This portfolio complements my enterprise career with recent, inspectable practice in infrastructure and cloud delivery. I use AI to support investigation and implementation, then check changes against source, tests and deployed behaviour.
View education & certificationsGet in touch