Staff Site Reliability Engineer @ NBA 🏀 | Disabled US Army Vet 🪖 | Infrastructure & Operations | Professional Feather Ruffler 😏 | All opinions are my own.
I keep highly available systems running for a global audience, then build the same kind of infrastructure again in public so other people can read the code. Multi-account org design, EKS, Terraform, and the operational scar tissue that comes with running it for real. Everything below is public, forkable, and free.
| Project | What it is |
|---|---|
| aws-eks-reference-platform | A forkable AWS multi-account reference platform: org, landing zone, EKS, GPU/AI, built in layers. Zero stored AWS credentials, every decision written up as an ADR. Docs |
| Infrastructure & Operations Academy | A free DevOps and SRE curriculum. Not an awesome-list dump, a progressive path from foundations to advanced. Repo |
| Notes | Working notes and transferable guides on AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform, and Linux. Written for me, kept public for everyone else. |
| samueltillman.com | Where I write it all up. Hugo on AWS Amplify. |
Building an AWS Multi-Account EKS Platform in Public, a series that walks the reference platform layer by layer: bootstrapping the org with no stored credentials, the landing zone, the EKS cluster foundation, and the things that broke along the way. Every claim in it is verifiable against the repo.
Recent posts:
- Claude Code Meets Amazon Bedrock: AI-Powered DevOps Without Leaving AWS
- The Infrastructure & Operations Academy: A Free Curriculum for Cloud, DevOps, and SRE Skills
- My Top 5 Favorite AWS Services (Right Now)
Cloud & Infrastructure
- AWS multi-account architecture: Organizations, SCPs, IAM Identity Center, landing zones
- EKS and container platforms, ECS/Fargate, serverless
- Infrastructure as Code: Terraform, CloudFormation
DevOps & Automation
- CI/CD: GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, Bitbucket Pipelines, Jenkins
- OIDC federation, secrets management (Secrets Manager, External Secrets, Vault)
- Security compliance, guardrails, and cost governance
Reliability
- High availability and resilience: multi-AZ and multi-region design, failover, capacity planning
- Incident response, on-call, postmortems, and the follow-up work that actually prevents repeats
- SLOs and error budgets
Core
- Linux systems administration (RHEL, Amazon Linux, Ubuntu)
- Networking, DNS, load balancing, edge (Route 53, CloudFront, Akamai)
- Observability: CloudWatch, Prometheus, Grafana, New Relic, Splunk
HashiCorp Terraform Associate, KCNA (Kubernetes and Cloud Native Associate), AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner, Microsoft Azure Administrator Associate, Splunk Certified Power User, New Relic APM Fundamentals
Full work history: RESUME.md. Skills matrix: samueltillman.com/resume.
Two decades and change in infrastructure, from Army IT and physical servers, through virtualization, to cloud native. Still learning, still ruffling feathers.