Mickael Asghar
Senior Cloud & DevOps Engineer helping growing SaaS engineering teams fix cloud cost,
deployment and reliability problems as their infrastructure gets harder to run.
About
I've spent 15+ years in infrastructure: first in enterprise consulting across the Automotive, Energy, Telecom and Aerospace sectors, and more recently in SaaS, including regulated Social Care.
Most recently, I ran the cloud migration and cutover of a regulated UK healthcare SaaS platform from private hosting to Microsoft Azure: 12 self-managed MySQL servers consolidated into 5 Azure managed MySQL databases, 850+ tenant schemas, no data loss.
I write here about real infrastructure work: what was done, what broke and what I'd do differently.
Born and raised in France to Pakistani parents, I hold dual British and French citizenship, and live with my Spanish wife and three children. That multicultural, multilingual upbringing helps me connect with people beyond just the technical requirements. Outside of work, you'll usually find me exploring new places and the outdoors, spending time with family, or listening to podcasts.
Work History
Migrated a regulated UK care management SaaS platform (~60k weekly users, 50M+ requests/week) from private hosting to Azure UK South, consolidating 12 self-managed MySQL servers (850+ tenant schemas) into 5 HA Azure Database for MySQL instances with no data loss. Built the platform with Bicep and Ansible, cut deployments from ~30 to ~5 minutes with CI/CD, and own Cloudflare, monitoring, certificate automation and incident response.
Architected a highly available 3-tier AWS platform (Auto Scaling, ELB, Route 53, multi-AZ RDS), provisioned with Terraform and secured with IAM roles, security groups and VPC segmentation. Built GitHub Actions CI/CD pipelines and a centralised AWS Backup strategy, and cut infrastructure spend by ~15% through rightsizing, removing idle resources and CloudWatch cost alerting.
Delivered infrastructure and network engineering projects as a consultant across major enterprise clients, including Vodafone, Airbus, ENGIE, SFR, Bouygues Telecom, and BNP Paribas, through Capgemini Engineering, one of the world's largest engineering consultancies.
Background
Education & Certifications
- Master's in Network Architecture and Security — ESIGELEC, France (2010)
- Certified Kubernetes Application Developer — The Linux Foundation (2023)
- HashiCorp Certified Terraform Associate (003) — HashiCorp (2023)
- AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner — AWS (2023)
- AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate — AWS (2021)
- ITIL Foundation — BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT (2017)
- PRINCE2 Foundation — APMG International (2016)
Technical Expertise
- Cloud & Infrastructure: AWS, Azure, GCP
- IaC & Config Management: Terraform, Azure Bicep, Ansible
- Containers & Orchestration: Docker, Kubernetes, EKS
- Programming & Scripting: Python, Go, Bash
- CI/CD: GitHub Actions, Jenkins, Bitbucket Pipelines
- Networking & Security: TCP/IP, DNS, SSL/TLS, Cloudflare
- Monitoring & Observability: CloudWatch, Grafana, Prometheus, Application Insights
- Identity & Access: OpenLDAP, SSO, OpenID Connect, Auth0
- Databases & Caching: Redis, MySQL, PostgreSQL
Languages
- French (Native)
- English (Fluent)
- Urdu (Fluent)
- Spanish (Conversational)
Sector Experience
- Automotive
- Energy
- Telecom
- Aerospace
- Social Care