Context
The CEA is one of France’s leading research organizations. I intervened as Technical Lead to modernize their infrastructure, deploy a Rancher RKE2 cluster on VMware vSphere, and establish a complete DevOps toolchain for scientific application teams.
Responsibilities
- Deployed and administered Rancher RKE2 clusters on VMware vSphere for container orchestration
- Set up monitoring stack: Prometheus, Grafana dashboards, Centreon for infrastructure monitoring
- Configured distributed logging with Elasticsearch/Kibana (ELK stack) and Alertmanager for alerting
- Deployed Longhorn as distributed storage solution, combined with VMware vSphere CSI for persistent volumes
- Wrote Ansible playbooks for fully automated cluster installation and configuration
- Implemented Kyverno policies for security and compliance enforcement
- Set up CI/CD pipelines with GitLab for continuous integration, image building, scanning and artifact management
- Provisioned Artifactory as a container registry and binary repository
Key Achievements
- Reduced infrastructure provisioning time by 80% through Ansible automation
- Established a single-pane-of-glass monitoring view covering 50+ nodes
- Enabled scientific teams to self-serve container deployments with guardrails via Kyverno
Technical environment: VMware vSphere, Rancher RKE2, GitLab, Kyverno, Artifactory, Elasticsearch, Grafana, ArgoCD, Ansible, Longhorn, Prometheus, LDAP