Azure Architecture
Azure infrastructure design for application hosting, networking and secure connectivity.
GABRIEL DINESCU / SRE & CLOUD INFRASTRUCTURE
Reliability.
Built through
experience.
Senior Site Reliability Engineer and Azure Consultant with hands-on cloud architect experience. I design Azure infrastructure, lead SRE delivery and help teams navigate the moments when production needs them most.
Open to remote B2B engagements
15+years across IT operations,
infrastructure & service management
infrastructure & service management
05people in the SRE team
I lead and work alongside
I lead and work alongside
E2Efrom infrastructure design
to production recovery
to production recovery
SERVICES / REMOTE B2B
Azure infrastructure.
Operational confidence.
Focused engagements across cloud architecture,
reliability and day-to-day operations.
SRE Consulting
Operational reviews, reliability priorities, on-call practices and service ownership.
Disaster Recovery
Recovery planning, regional failover exercises and RPO / RTO validation.
Observability
Application Insights, Grafana and Azure monitoring connected to practical incident triage.
Incident Response
Production investigation, coordinated recovery and follow-up improvements.
Infrastructure Automation
PowerShell runbooks and Terraform workflows for repeatable infrastructure operations.
Cloud Cost Optimization
Cost deviation reviews and scheduled non-production capacity management.
01 / CASE STUDIES
What reliability looks like
in practice.
Anonymized engineering case studies.
Context, decisions and outcomes; no client identities.
01 / DISASTER RECOVERYAzure · Production
From a regional incident
to a working recovery.
When an Azure regional compute incident caused production latency, I investigated the impact, recommended disaster recovery and executed the client-approved failover to a standby environment.
- Problem
- Regional compute disruption caused production latency.
- Solution
- Investigate impact, execute an approved failover and validate the recovered service.
- Result
- Availability checks completed and alerts cleared after failover.
InvestigateApproveFail overVerify
Read the engineering detail
Recovery testing
In tested DR scenarios, I restored database backups in an unaffected region while launching infrastructure provisioning pipelines in parallel. I reconnected applications, updated Front Door routing and configured backups in the recovered environment.
Validation
Recovery tests met agreed RPO and RTO objectives. During the production failover, I performed SRE availability checks and observed alert clearance.
02 / PRIVATE ACCESS
Public services.
Private backoffice.
Designed customer-specific Azure infrastructure separating public traffic from VPN-only backoffice access.
- Problem
- Backoffice access needed isolation from public application traffic.
- Solution
- Separate ingress paths using private networking, Private Endpoint and private DNS.
- Result
- A VPN-only backoffice path with public access disabled for the private application.
Read the engineering detail
Used dedicated Envoy proxies, a private Application Gateway, App Service Private Endpoint and private DNS, with public access disabled for the private application path.
Configured WAF in Prevention mode and implemented security-approved rule adjustments and remediation requests following client-commissioned independent penetration testing.
03 / AUTOMATION & COST
Capacity that follows
the working day.
Wrote and maintained a tag-driven runbook for scheduled non-production scale-down and opt-in scale-up.
- Problem
- Non-production capacity needed to follow working hours across regions.
- Solution
- Use a tag-driven runbook with regional schedules and application-tested SKUs.
- Result
- Scheduled scale-down and opt-in scale-up implemented; no savings percentage claimed.
Read the engineering detail
The runbook accounts for regional time zones and restores capacity to application-tested SKUs. I also review weekly costs and investigate deviations.
The implementation links scheduling decisions to resource tags and tested capacity, making non-production scaling an explicit operational choice.
04 / CERTIFICATE LIFECYCLE
Make expiry visible.
Manage renewal.
Migrated all customers using the Front Door solution to Azure-managed certificates and developed PowerShell DNS-based certificate checks.
- Problem
- Certificate expiry needed visibility and manual configurations needed remediation.
- Solution
- Migrate the Front Door solution to Azure-managed certificates and add PowerShell expiry checks.
- Result
- Customers on that solution migrated; remaining internal endpoints monitored for expiry.
Read the engineering detail
Checks notify below 15 days to expiry for Front Door certificates and 30 days for internal endpoints. I remediate manual setups with managed certificates or Key Vault integration.
05 / OBSERVABILITY
Signals that lead
to action.
Combined external monitoring, Azure metrics and application telemetry to support incident triage and customer-specific alerting.
- Problem
- Incident triage needed actionable signals across applications and connectivity.
- Solution
- Combine external monitoring, Azure metrics and application telemetry with tailored alerts.
- Result
- Customer-specific alerting and VPN Gateway monitoring added to support detection and triage.
Read the engineering detail
I tune response-time and error-count alerts to QA-defined standards and customer requirements, resolve SRE-owned issues and route other incidents to the appropriate teams.
Following intermittent connectivity failures, I added Azure VPN Gateway metric-based alerting to improve detection and customer communication.
ARCHITECTURE / GENERIC PATTERNS
Make the system visible.
Conceptual diagrams, without customer names,
addresses or production configuration.
Public application, private backoffice
Separate entry paths for public users and authorized internal users.
- Public users
- Azure Front Door / WAF
- Public application
- Authorized users
- VPN + private ingress
- App Service Private Endpoint
Conceptual pattern. Routing, DNS and recovery dependencies require environment-specific design.
Regional disaster recovery
A recovery sequence with an explicit decision point and service verification.
- Primary region
- Incident assessment
- Approved failover
- Database backups
- Standby infrastructure
- Restore + verify + route
Conceptual pattern. Routing, DNS and recovery dependencies require environment-specific design.
BLOG / ENGINEERING NOTES
Lessons from operations.
Practical notes on Azure, observability
and keeping production recoverable.
AZURE APP SERVICE / AZURE FRONT DOOR
Azure certificate lifecycle: visibility before expiry
A practical checklist for inventory, ownership and renewal verification.
Read article →DISASTER RECOVERY / INCIDENT RESPONSE
Disaster recovery: turn a plan into a rehearsed workflow
Recovery decisions, parallel work and evidence that the recovered service works.
Read article →OBSERVABILITY / AZURE INFRASTRUCTURE
Observability that supports incident response
Connect telemetry to service ownership, useful alerts and recovery decisions.
Read article →02 / THE EXPERIENCE
A career built
close to
production.
From service management and telecom infrastructure to Azure architecture and SRE leadership.
Get the full CV (PDF)JUL 2021 — PRESENT
Team Lead — Cloud SRE
FintechOS Romania
I lead four SRE engineers while contributing to technical delivery. My scope spans Azure architecture, incident response, disaster recovery, monitoring and automation.
I manage on-call rotations, daily coordination and task allocation; own SLA reporting; execute production deployments and upgrades; and support infrastructure, security and DR discussions with prospective customers.
OCT 2019 — JUL 2021
Senior Cloud Infrastructure Engineer
Temenos Romania
Managed end-to-end Azure infrastructure and L3 support. Deployed private connectivity, App Services and Functions, with Service Bus and Log Analytics integration.
Supported VMs, load balancers and VPN connectivity, and served as the infrastructure architecture contact for external connectivity and new implementations.
NOV 2014 — OCT 2019
Infrastructure Engineer
Orange Romania
Operated a Red Hat OpenStack IaaS platform, with L3 troubleshooting, network devices and load balancers. Delivered tenant deployments including Redis, HAProxy and Keepalived clusters.
Authored parameterized Terraform configurations for VMs, networking and disks, using modules, separate workspaces and reviewed execution plans. Used Ansible, supported Docker and Kubernetes use cases, and automated backups with Bash.
2009 — 2014
The service management foundation
Orange Romania · Ericsson Romania
At Orange, managed the Mail project's production service and supported Orange Money through capacity, defect and service-quality management and disaster recovery planning.
At Ericsson, progressed from Senior Change Management Analyst to Change Manager: assessed change risks, coordinated planned work, ran CAB meetings and coached teams on change procedures.
Earlier roles & exact dates
Orange — Technical Service Manager, Mail: 2013–2014.
Orange — Technical Service Manager, Orange Money: Nov 2012–Oct 2013.
Ericsson — Change Manager: Sep 2011–Nov 2012.
Ericsson — Senior Change Management Analyst: Aug 2009–Sep 2011.
HP GeBOC — Back Office Sales Support: Jan–Aug 2009.
UPC — Business Customer Care: Oct 2007–Jan 2009.
RCS&RDS — Call Center Agent: Mar–Oct 2007.
03 / ENGINEERING TOOLKIT
Technology, with context.
The tools behind the work.
From cloud architecture to daily operations.
Cloud & networking
Azure App Service, Front Door, Application Gateway / WAF, Private Endpoint, Private DNS, VPN, Key Vault, Functions, Service Bus, Red Hat OpenStack.
Automation & platforms
PowerShell, runbooks, Terraform, Ansible, Bash, Docker, Kubernetes, Redis, HAProxy, Keepalived.
Reliability & delivery
Application Insights, Grafana, Site24x7, Log Analytics, incident triage, DR testing, regional failover, RPO / RTO validation, SLA reporting.
Continuous learning
Azure AZ-104 training course · Red Hat OpenStack Administration · Red Hat 7 Service Administration · Red Hat System Administration II · Internal Ansible & Git training · ITIL V3 Foundation & Continual Service Improvement · SQL Basics · Virtualization
Beyond infrastructure
Psychology, Spiru Haret University, Bucharest (2018–2021). Accounting, Economical High School “Profesia” (2000–2004).
English: advanced. French: intermediate reading and writing; basic speaking.
04 / LET'S WORK TOGETHER
Your next infrastructure
challenge. Let's talk.
Open to remote B2B engagements in SRE and cloud infrastructure.
gabriel@thesreexperience.com