About
Andrew Sapozhnikov is a seasoned professional with 20 years of work experience, who combines a strong technical background with a passion for innovation, effective teamwork, and security. He started his career as a support engineer of an Internet Service Provider (ISP) and transitioned to the network engineer in the Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) department, where he actively contributed to the development of new billing systems and administered media gateways, servers, and Cisco routers.
Later, Andrew served as an Ops leader on various Namba projects, including Namba.kg, Namba Food, Namba Taxi, and more. His responsibilities included managing and overseeing hundreds of servers across four countries. Andrew implemented a robust configuration management system and began migrating several services to LXC containers. As the popularity of Docker grew, he shifted his focus towards migrating applications to Docker containers.
Following his time at Namba, Andrew ventured into a new role as co-founder and CIO of Mad Devs. He focuses on deploying cloud technologies, adopting modern approaches to code development and delivery, and implementing containerization and application orchestration. Andrew actively contributed to the company's infrastructure and DevOps initiatives, including migrating products to and between cloud platforms, building hybrid infrastructures, migrating to Kubernetes, containerizing applications, and more.
His notable achievements include migrating Veeqo to AWS and Kubernetes, migrating Mythx from AWS to Azure, migrating Clutch to Kubernetes, and developing a PCI DSS-compliant infrastructure for Dzing. Additionally, Andrew created a comprehensive AWS EKS infrastructure boilerplate using Terraform, which served as the foundation for numerous projects at Mad Devs. These endeavors required meticulous planning and resulted in high-quality outcomes adhering to modern approaches and utilizing the latest tools. His dedication to staying up-to-date with the latest security practices ensures that the projects he works on prioritize robust protection against potential threats.
Andrew is known in the field for his strong emphasis on documentation, IaC principles, and his ability to foster effective teamwork. He has built a team of like-minded professionals who share his passion for improving the tech landscape.
Education
Kyrgyz-Russian Slavic University
Bachelor’s degree in Software Engineering
Industries
Serverless
E-commerce
Transportation
Articles and insights
HIPAA Compliance on Cloud Infrastructure
Today, we will try to understand in general what HIPAA is and how we can comply with this standard in the software and infrastructure scope. Even though this is a standard, its technical requirements could be clearer in places, and implementation may vary from project to project so we won't go into the details here.I had extensive experience with planning infrastructure to comply with standards and legal regulations. One of my projects fell under HIPAA-regulated entities but closed before taking off. In another project, I developed infrastructure from scratch to comply with Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), and it got certified. We won't delve into this intricate, extensive story right now. However, similarities in both cases significantly hindered productivity and quality during audit preparations.So, before we discuss HIPAA, let's briefly analyze these points:
DevOps
Cloud Cost Optimization: How to Reduce Your Cloud Bill
This is not surprising because, in 2024, 80% of companies will be unaware of their mistakes in their cloud adoption and will overspend by 20 to 50%. If you haven’t optimized your cloud, you’re probably not spending your money in the right ways.Сost management and cost optimization best practices have a lot of overlap. When you’re working with the cloud, you should optimize it. Today, we’re going to look at Mad Devs' cloud cost optimization experience, and also we will offer you nine important best practices for optimizing your cloud costs.
DevOps
DevOps Engineer Skills Matrix: A Roadmap to a Career in DevOps
This article will discuss critical DevOps engineering skills that make you an expert. So, since we understand that people come to our company from different jobs and all have a different scope of competencies and levels of knowledge, we decided to create a universal roadmap for the growth and development of a DevOps engineer. But it didn't work as we wanted, so we decided to go the other way and create a list of skills and competencies needed to work in our company. Thus, having made a three-level system, each level consists of a questionnaire and criteria for the candidate. To put it another way, we prepared the first version of grading and certification. However, this system also did not help to solve our problem. Later we found a great tool - a self-assessment skill matrix. We decided to put the tool into practice for DevOps and later transformed it into a skill matrix. After that, we held a session where we set ourselves current and desired six-month grades. We used Miro as a tool, but you can also use Google sheets.Because DevOps engineers in Mad Devs go deep into the operational and infrastructure parts, we have defined a knowledge stack for our current and future employees to start working as junior “MadOps”.
DevOps
