Gaurav Kaushal

Senior DevOps Engineer

Optum · UnitedHealth Group · India

I'm a Senior DevOps Engineer with 8+ years of experience building and running production infrastructure at scale. I currently work at Optum (part of UnitedHealth Group), managing CI/CD pipelines, Kubernetes clusters, on-premise server fleets, and cloud infrastructure that supports millions of users.

This site — From the Trenches — is where I document what I've actually learned in production. Not documentation rewrites. Not beginner tutorials padded to 2,000 words. The real decisions, the real failures, and the lessons that only come from running systems under real load and fixing them when they break at 2am.

If something on this site helped you solve a real problem, that's the point.

YEARS EXPERIENCE

100+

SERVERS MANAGED

ARTICLES WRITTEN

40%

DEFECT REDUCTION

What I Work With

KubernetesEKSDockerArgoCD TerraformAnsibleJenkinsGitHub Actions AWSEC2S3LambdaEKS PrometheusGrafanaVault LinuxBashPython SonarQubeTrivyGitleaks

Experience

Senior DevOps Engineer

Optum / UnitedHealth Group

2022 — Present

Managing large-scale on-premises and hybrid cloud infrastructure. Building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines across multiple teams. Running Kubernetes in production, managing monitoring and observability stacks, and improving deployment reliability across distributed engineering teams.

DevOps Engineer

Nlineaxis IT Solutions

2015 — 2022 · 7 years

Built and maintained infrastructure for enterprise clients across multiple verticals. Implemented Jenkins CI/CD pipelines, managed Linux server fleets using Ansible, introduced containerisation with Docker, and delivered measurable results including a 40% reduction in production defects through automated testing and deployment gates.

Certifications

AWS Solutions Architect — Associate HashiCorp Terraform Associate

Writing & Content

I publish long-form DevOps guides on this site, produce tutorials on Tech with MrKay on YouTube, and send a newsletter called From the Trenches. All content is drawn directly from production experience — if I haven't done it at scale, I don't write about it.

This blog is not AI-generated filler. Every article on this site reflects real infrastructure decisions, real incidents, and real lessons from enterprise environments. The goal is depth over volume — guides that are actually useful when you're in the middle of a problem, not just when you're learning from scratch.

What This Site Covers

The articles here span the full DevOps stack — Kubernetes troubleshooting, Terraform module design, CI/CD pipeline comparisons, AWS cost optimisation, GitOps with ArgoCD, monitoring with Prometheus and Grafana, DevSecOps pipelines, and platform engineering. New articles published regularly in 2026 covering AI in DevOps, EKS upgrade strategies, Vault secrets management, and more.

Browse all articles on the blog page or start with the DevOps Roadmap if you're orienting yourself in the field.