GGGayan Gunapala

Sydney, Australia

Gayan Gunapala

Cloud, DevOps and Infrastructure Engineer

I build cloud foundations on AWS and Azure, finish stalled migrations and keep platforms reliable. Nearly 20 years in systems, from data centre servers and carrier-grade telco platforms to the cloud.

Get in touchSee selected work
Portrait of Gayan Gunapala
  • Experience

    20yrs

    Nearly two decades building and running systems, since 2006

  • Cloud

    AWS+ Azure

    Foundations, migrations, EKS and Terraform, plus multi-cloud hosting

  • Data centre

    On-prem

    Physical servers, routers and switches, set up and run by hand

  • Background

    Telco

    A decade on carrier-grade charging and real-time systems

About

From telco switches to cloud platforms

My first decade was in telco, at Dialog Axiata, Sri Lanka's leading telecommunications provider, and at Alcatel-Lucent. As technical lead of Dialog's converged charging solutions division, I built an event engine processing more than 10,000 transactions a second, wrote a Diameter stack from scratch in C, and led teams on award-winning projects. The work was hands-on at every layer, from configuring physical servers, routers and switches in the data centre to the software running on them.

Since moving to Sydney in 2016, I've built hosting platforms across AWS and Azure and run DevOps for companies across regtech, proptech and fintech. That work includes multi-account, shared-VPC AWS migrations, EKS uplifts with blue-green cluster upgrades, replacing home-grown infrastructure code with Terraform, and disaster recovery that relaunches a platform in another AWS region within four hours.

I advise where that helps and do the hands-on work. I take on a small number of outside projects through Aperture Digital Solutions, where I am one of three partners.

Selected work

Things I've led and delivered

Projects from employed roles, described without client names or confidential detail.

  • AWS migration

    Multi-account, shared-VPC AWS

    Delivered a major Terraform upgrade and moved an AWS estate to a multi-account, shared-VPC setup.

  • Kubernetes

    EKS without the upgrade dread

    Moved EKS clusters into a single VPC and replaced the ingress controller, making blue-green cluster upgrades possible.

  • Disaster recovery

    Another region in 4 hours

    Designed disaster recovery that relaunches a whole platform in another AWS region within four hours.

  • Cost

    Observability at a lower cost

    Replaced Datadog with self-hosted Prometheus, Grafana and ELK, and added after-hours shutdowns of dev environments.

  • Infrastructure as code

    Standard Terraform, faster deploys

    Replaced a non-standard infrastructure-as-code stack with Terraform, speeding up deployments.

  • Telco scale

    Carrier-grade, real time

    Built an event engine processing 10,000+ transactions a second and wrote a Diameter stack from scratch in C.

Things I've built

My own projects

Products I design, build and run myself, outside my day job.

  • AskMaha.guru

    Live

    Brings out teachings from a living source. I build and maintain it end to end.

    askmaha.guru

  • FairPro

    In development

    A contract management platform from Aperture Digital Solutions, with a first pilot planned for December 2026.

Experience

Career

  1. 2023 – now

    Senior DevOps Engineer

    Fintech, Sydney
  2. 2022 – 2023

    Senior DevOps Engineer

    Slyp · fintech
  3. 2020 – 2022

    Senior DevSecOps Engineer

    Sympli · property e-settlement
  4. 2018 – 2020

    DevOps Engineer

    Red Marker · regtech
  5. 2016 – 2018

    Senior Systems Engineer

    Arq Group · web hosting

    Built multi-cloud cPanel hosting on AWS and Azure, with DNS, MySQL, Puppet and bastion servers.

  6. 2010 – 2016

    Technical Lead, Converged Charging Solutions

    Dialog Axiata · telecommunications

    Projects won Dialog's Innovation of the Year and IT Project of the Year awards, among others.

  7. 2009

    IN/VAS Technical Support Engineer

    Alcatel-Lucent, Thailand

    Main technical contact for the operator, working with HP and Oracle on hardware support.

  8. 2006 – 2009

    Engineer, IN Planning and Operations

    Dialog Axiata

    Kept intelligent network platforms on Linux, Solaris and HP-UX servers highly available.

Education

2002 – 2006

BSc Engineering (Hons), Electronic and Telecommunication Engineering

University of Moratuwa · Upper Second-Class Honours

Toolkit

Skills

Cloud platforms

  • AWS VPC
  • Multi-account
  • EKS
  • ECS
  • Lambda
  • RDS
  • API Gateway
  • Azure
  • Azure AD (Entra ID)

Infrastructure as code

  • Terraform
  • CloudFormation
  • Ansible
  • Puppet

Containers and delivery

  • Docker
  • Kubernetes
  • Helm
  • GitHub Actions
  • Jenkins
  • Octopus

Observability

  • Prometheus
  • Grafana
  • ELK
  • Datadog
  • New Relic
  • Splunk

Security and reliability

  • IAM and SSO
  • Vault
  • Image scanning
  • SLOs and error budgets
  • Disaster recovery

Data centre and networking

  • Physical server setup
  • Router and switch configuration
  • Cisco
  • Huawei Quidway
  • TCP/IP, SCTP and SS7
  • HP and Oracle hardware
  • Capacity and bandwidth planning

Telco platforms

  • Online charging (OCS)
  • Intelligent network (IN)
  • Diameter
  • PCRF/PCEF and DPI
  • Real-time event processing
  • Telco APIs (WSO2)

Systems and software

  • Linux and Red Hat
  • Solaris and HP-UX
  • High availability
  • Microservices
  • IoT platforms
  • Python
  • Bash
  • C
  • Java

Outside work

Away from the terminal

What keeps me busy away from the day job.

  • Music

    I play in a band.

  • Photography

    A long-standing interest, at home and on the road.

  • Travel

    New places, and the people and food that come with them.

  • Spirituality

    Spirituality matters a lot to me. It is why I build AskMaha.guru.

    More about AskMaha.guru

Contact

Let's talk

For cloud foundations, migrations, platform uplifts or a cost and reliability review, I work through Aperture Digital Solutions. Otherwise, LinkedIn or email is the easiest way to reach me.