ayaan retiwala · platform engineer

i build all
the way down.

at excloud, i built the core of a public cloud, from qemu hosts and spdk volumes to the console and cli people used to run it.

selected work ↓

i spent three years building excloud's core platform with the engineering lead, then operating it for more than 4,000 accounts.

excloud

platform engineer

my work crossed the whole machine: qemu/kvm compute, spdk block storage, managed kubernetes, networking, identity, and the tools people used to control them.

it was a small team, so production was part of the design. i handled escalations directly and carried what broke back into the control planes.

compute / storage
a go control plane over qemu/kvm, and spdk + nvme-of block storage whose reconciler recovered interrupted provisioning instead of leaving orphaned volumes behind.
clusters / network
managed kubernetes through bootstrap, cilium, csi, and karpenter; plus identity, authoritative dns, and the arp/ndp machinery under the network.
developer surface
a go http layer that derives openapi 3.1 from types, feeding the sdk, cli, and terraform provider used across more than twenty services.

4,000+ accounts380 active vms140 managed postgres clusters20+ internal services

some things i made because i wanted them to exist.

dbconsole

electron · postgres

a postgres workbench for web and macos, with streaming results, schema graphs, destructive-query warnings, and encrypted query sync.

cbmanager

swift · appkit · sqlite

a native macos clipboard manager with instant paste-back, ocr for copied images, and local search over a sqlite history.

rig

react · fastify · websockets

a phone-first console for dispatching pi sessions and watching tool calls live while my computer does the work.

tachyon

pwa · offline-first

an offline-first manga reader with downloads, auto-scroll, source adapters, and anilist sync.

more finished things and unfinished ideas live on github.