About Me

I'm Shell Ygin, a London-based Principal DevOps engineer with over 12 years of building and operating reliable, secure platforms at scale.

My Journey

I cut my teeth on Debian servers and bare-metal PXE installs back when "the cloud" was still a weather phenomenon. Since then, I've led cloud migrations and platform modernization efforts for UK fintech and media companies, watching the industry evolve from pet servers to cattle clusters to whatever we're calling serverless containers this week.

What I Do

My work blends pragmatic automation with a strong security stance. I believe in least privilege, clear boundaries, reproducible builds, and refreshingly boring, well-documented systems. When I'm not shaving yaks or debugging why the staging environment works differently than production (again), you'll find me:

• Instrumenting everything with OpenTelemetry
• Pruning YAML footguns before they multiply
• Writing about what actually works in production
• Conducting incident drills and fostering postmortem culture

My Expertise

• Kubernetes: From single clusters to multi-region orchestration
• Infrastructure as Code: Terraform and Ansible (with appropriate blast radius controls)
• CI/CD: Pipelines that don't require a PhD to debug
• Observability: Prometheus, Grafana, and OpenTelemetry stacks
• Security: Hardening systems without breaking developer workflows
• FinOps: Cost governance that doesn't involve spreadsheet archaeology
• Incident Response: Because 3 AM pages build character

Philosophy

I prefer reproducible systems over heroic dashboards. Reliability beats cleverness every time. I translate technical risk into clear business trade-offs and automate the sharp edges while documenting everything else in plain English.

What You'll Find Here

I write about the bits I've tuned, broken, and fixed. Expect scripts you can actually paste, guardrails you'll want to keep, and the occasional dry aside when YAML decides to behave like a choose-your-own-adventure book.

No mystique in ops, no hype in the content—just practical insights from someone who's been on-call long enough to appreciate boring infrastructure.

Shell Ygin, Principal DevOps/SRE, London

P.S. Tea > coffee during incident calls, and yes, I do use ThinkPad keycaps as stress toys.

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