Jose Barahona
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Projects

A mix of homelab experiments, open-source tools, and professional infrastructure work. Many client engagements involved FinTech, healthcare, and regulated environments — SOC 2, HIPAA, and PCI-DSS. Due to NDAs those can’t be named, but representative work is described below.


Personal & Open Source

SpinPong OBS Overlay · Node.js WebSocket OBS

ESPN-style live score overlay for table tennis streams. A Node.js + WebSocket server syncs a mobile controller to a 1920×1080 transparent OBS browser source in real time — no second operator needed. Handles ITTF scoring rules, serve rotation, and sponsor overlays.

SpinPong Leaderboards · Docker Nginx Self-hosted

Self-hosted public leaderboard and club ranking system for a table tennis club. Runs on the homelab behind a reverse proxy — no cloud bill, no vendor lock-in, full operational control.

Homelab Infrastructure · Kubernetes ArgoCD Gitea Terraform Prometheus

Personal lab running Gitea, ArgoCD, Prometheus + Grafana, and a NAS — all deployed via GitOps from a private repo. ArgoCD reconciles state on every restart; nothing gets configured by hand. Raspberry Pi IoT sensors feed metrics into Grafana dashboards.

vim-config · Vim

Pre-configured Vim setup with plugins tailored for developers and ops professionals. Drop it in and get a productive editor immediately — no manual configuration.

docker-xen-orchestra · Docker XenServer

Containerized deployment of Xen Orchestra, the management UI for XCP-ng / Citrix Hypervisor. Makes running Xen Orchestra fully reproducible without the manual build process.


Professional Work

Multi-cloud Infrastructure Platform · Terraform AWS GCP Azure Kubernetes

Led infrastructure initiatives spanning AWS, GCP, and Azure for US-based clients. Built reusable Terraform modules for VPCs, IAM, managed Kubernetes clusters, and networking — cutting provisioning time by 60% and reducing operational overhead by 50%.

CI/CD Pipeline Modernization · GitLab CI/CD Jenkins Codefresh ArgoCD

Designed and optimized delivery pipelines across multiple clients, accelerating release cycles by 70%. Introduced GitOps patterns with ArgoCD for Kubernetes workloads and standardized pipeline templates reused across environments.

Full Observability Stack — LGTM · Prometheus Grafana Loki Tempo Mimir New Relic

Deployed and operated the full Grafana LGTM stack inside Kubernetes for multiple clients. Wired service discovery, retention, alert rules, and dashboards so on-call engineers can correlate logs, metrics, and traces without SSH access. Reduced incident resolution time significantly and improved uptime by 50%.

Kafka Performance Tuning on Kubernetes · Kafka Kubernetes GKE ksql

Load tested and tuned Kafka-based event streaming architectures on GKE and self-managed clusters. Increased system capacity by 40% to handle high-throughput, low-latency transaction processing in FinTech environments.

HA Kafka Clusters with ksql · Kafka Kubernetes Codefresh

Built and maintained highly available Kafka clusters with ksql clients on Kubernetes for data streaming workloads. Integrated with Databricks via Codefresh pipelines for Big Data processing.

Big Data Pipeline — Codefresh to Databricks · Codefresh Databricks Kubernetes

Designed and built data pipelines from Kubernetes-hosted services into Databricks analytics environments. Architected a multi-environment shared-variables approach in Codefresh that reduced pipeline duplication across projects.

Apigee High-Throughput PoC on GCP · Apigee GCP Kubernetes

Led a proof of concept targeting high-throughput API scenarios using Apigee on GCP in a FinTech payment platform. Validated scalability patterns for real-time financial transaction processing.

Kubernetes Cluster Bootstrap — RKE + Ansible · RKE Ansible Bash Terraform

Built a repeatable solution for provisioning Kubernetes clusters from scratch using RKE, Ansible, and Terraform. Used across AWS and bare-metal environments to standardize cluster setup and reduce manual steps.

On-premise Kubernetes with Rancher RK2 · Rancher RK2 Ansible Kubernetes

Deployed and managed Rancher Kubernetes clusters for on-premise environments using RK2 and Ansible playbooks. Enabled clients to run cloud-native workloads without cloud provider dependency.

GitLab CI/CD Pipeline — 70% Release Time Reduction · GitLab CI/CD Terraform Kubernetes

Designed a CI/CD pipeline at Modusbox that reduced release time from 1 hour to 15 minutes by automating previously manual deployment and validation steps. Deployed IaC within the pipeline using Terraform and GitLab CI.

AWS Cloud Infrastructure — FinTech Payments · AWS EC2 RDS ELB Terraform Kafka

Implemented and operated AWS environments for a FinTech real-time payments platform: EC2, S3, RDS, EBS, ELB, Auto Scaling Groups, IAM, Route 53. Managed Kafka for event streaming within a microservices architecture.

JenkinsX Migration on Kubernetes · JenkinsX Kubernetes Jenkins

Migrated a Jenkins CI server from EC2 instances to a Kubernetes-native JenkinsX setup, improving pipeline scalability and eliminating single-host failure risks.

Nagios/Centreon Monitoring + Prometheus Dashboards · Nagios Centreon Prometheus Grafana

Built monitoring infrastructure for a small business: Nagios/Centreon for infrastructure health alerting, and Prometheus dashboards for client-facing device metrics. Established proactive alerting before issues reached end users.

SMTP & BMS Appliances for Industrial Systems · Linux HVAC Industrial UPS Bash

Developed custom SMTP and BMS (Building Management System) appliances to monitor HVAC systems and Industrial UPS devices, providing operational visibility for critical physical infrastructure.

© Jose Barahona 2026