Peter Rifel
Staff Software Engineer at Datadog
Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolPeter Rifel is a Staff Software Engineer with 11 years of experience building and automating large-scale cloud and Kubernetes platforms, currently driving multi-cloud Kubernetes provisioning and upgrades at Datadog. He blends deep infrastructure-as-code expertise (Terraform, Ansible, Puppet) with systems programming in Go and Python to improve reliability and performance for tens of thousands of nodes and hundreds of thousands of pods. At TUNE he led multi-region Kubernetes platform rollout, certificate automation that saved $20k+/month, and standardized CI/CD pipelines to increase deployment velocity and reduce outages. An active contributor to core Kubernetes projects (kOps, test-infra, etcdadm), he has hands-on experience hardening AWS test and production workflows, improving IAM, VPC and ASG integrations, and upgrading cloud SDKs across regions. Based in Minneapolis, he pairs pragmatic operational judgment with a knack for dependency and automation fixes that quietly prevent incidents at scale.
11 years of coding experience
14 years of employment as a software developer
BS Computer Science, BS Computer Science at Michigan State University
Github Skills (20)
dependency-management10
kubernetes10
cloud-infrastructure10
etcd10
terraform10
infrastructure-management10
cicd10
terraformer10
infrastructure10
go10
aws10
kubernetes-pods10
ias10
devops10
testing9
Programming languages (15)
Github contributions (5)
kubernetes/kops
Dec 2017 - Sep 2022
Kubernetes Operations (kOps) - Production Grade k8s Installation, Upgrades and Management
Role in this project:
Back-end & DevOps Engineer
Back-end & DevOps EngineerContributions:2 releases, 1072 reviews, 906 commits in 4 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Peter primarily contributed to AWS infrastructure and Kubernetes operations, focusing on improvements and fixes within the kOps project. Their work included addressing issues related to networking configurations, such as managing VPC CIDR blocks and supporting the integration of external DNS configurations. Additionally, the user implemented features like adding support for EC2 instance profiles, updating AWS IAM authenticator components, and managing AWS Auto Scaling Group (ASG) resources. They also made enhancements to cluster validation and added support for Kops upgrades to be run with terraform targets.
containersgcphelmlinodeinstallation
kubernetes-retired/etcdadm
Mar 2020 - Apr 2022
Role in this project:Backend & DevOps Engineer
Backend & DevOps EngineerContributions:32 reviews, 10 commits, 4 PRs in 2 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Peter primarily contributed to the maintenance and enhancement of the `etcdadm` project. They added support for specific etcd versions, including v3.3.17 and v3.5.3, indicating a focus on core functionality and compatibility. Furthermore, they upgraded the AWS SDK and addressed go module pathing issues, highlighting DevOps and dependency management skills within the project. Additionally, the user made adjustments to existing code to accommodate new AWS regions, showcasing cloud infrastructure knowledge.
etcdk8s-sig-cluster-lifecycle
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