Richard Bonnette

Led design, deployment, and maintenance of secure and scalable AKS clusters for internal development teams, enabling project-specific Kubernetes environments aligned with Thales’ digital transformation initiatives. Coached developers on Kubernetes, GitOps, and infrastructure as code (IaC) best practices. Migrated infrastructure from Terraform to Terragrunt for flexibility and reduced deployment complexity. Achieved ~30-minute cluster provisioning when Azure throttling allowed. Scaled AKS fleet from ~80 to ~200 clusters by consolidating configuration responsibilities and leveraging GitOps. Introduced FluxCD to migrate cluster configuration from IaC-driven to GitOps-driven workflows, simplifying maintenance. Built a standardized base platform using cloud-native tools: Ingress-Nginx, External-DNS, Cert-Manager with Lets Encrypt, Linkerd for mTLS and service mesh, Prometheus & Grafana for metrics and dashboards, Helm for application deployment, Terraform / Terragrunt, Azure.

Maintained local infrastructure, including domain controllers, servers, and core office systems. Performed hardware replacements, on-call incident response, and general systems support. Responsible for maintaining and updating PCI-DSS documentation and audit schedules. Implemented and improved operational workflows across infrastructure and cloud systems. Key achievements: Migrated from Highwinds CDN to AWS CloudFront, reducing operational costs. Designed and implemented a content ingestion and distribution workflow for the Multimedia team. Deployed Cloudability (FinOps tool) to deliver cost visibility per project and implement anomalous-cost alerting. Used Terraform, CodePipeline, and AWS Lambda to automate deployment of multiple free-tour websites.