Portrait of Luka Ločičnik

devops gitops platform engineering

Luka Ločičnik

DevOps Engineer at A1 Slovenija, d.d. — building declarative, self-service platforms on OpenShift & Kubernetes. Ljubljana, Slovenia.

status: deployed & running devopsluka@gmail.com
apiVersion: careers/v1 kind: Engineer metadata: name: luka-locicnik labels: role: devops mindset: everything-as-code spec: state: declarative replicas: 1 reconciledBy: argocd
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From the workshop floor to the control plane

I finished high school as a mechanical technician and continued studying informatics — while working across industry, catering and logistics. That mix taught me to pick up skills fast and stay ready for any kind of work.

I love challenges and long-running tasks that demand discipline and consistency: I break large chunks of work into smaller pieces and structure them into a unit. Since June 2022 I've been on the DevOps team at A1 Slovenija. My guiding idea: everything deployed should be declarative, so tools like ArgoCD can be maximised and DevOps levels up to GitOps.

Byte Garden — A1’s Internal Developer Platform

Byte Garden is where my platform-engineering push became a real product: a self-service hub for applications, services and infrastructure. Developers pick a standardized Helm chart from the catalog; Byte Garden renders a form from the chart's values, previews the YAML live, and provisions the whole project in one pass.

9cluster nodes
~1,800pods monitored live
100+ArgoCD applications
5systems provisioned in one pass

Software catalog

Standardized Helm charts — backend & frontend templates, percona-psql, kafka-resources, external-secrets, tekton-dotnet-ci, 3Scale — rendered as dynamic forms with live YAML preview and export.

One-pass provisioning

A three-step wizard creates the GitLab group structure, Quay registry org and robot account, Vault pull secrets and OpenShift namespace, and the ArgoCD application — then pushes the filled chart to Git.

System monitor

Live cluster overview, per-namespace workloads, Tekton pipeline runs and ArgoCD sync & health — plus integrated Vault and MinIO browsers.

Work experience

JUN 2022 — PRESENT · Ljubljana, Slovenia

DevOps Engineer

A1 Slovenija, d.d.

Started with deploying applications and services on microservice principles, then went deep into the tooling that makes it possible: Git, Linux, Podman & Docker, Kaniko, Buildah and Source-to-Image. From there — Kubernetes manifests and deploying images to the OpenShift cluster in many different ways, including BuildConfigs with Dockerfile and S2I. Developing pipelines in Kubernetes-native Tekton taught me where persistent volumes, mounted secrets, config maps and the different persistent volume claim types really earn their place.

  • helm · iac · gitops Learned Helm to parameterize CI/CD pipelines into reusable templates deployable across environments. Recognized the power of Infrastructure as Code and pushed the idea that every project and application should be of declarative state — maximizing ArgoCD and levelling up from DevOps to GitOps.
  • tekton pipelines Wrote dozens of reusable Tasks and ClusterTasks — and more pipelines than I can count. Provisioned and integrated systems like our own SonarQube server into Tekton Tasks; currently researching HashiCorp Vault integration into CI/CD.
  • feb 2024 · teaching Taught and led colleagues through a 3-month workshop on Red Hat OpenShift Administration I — Managing Containers and Kubernetes.
  • ansible · standardization Used Ansible to automate, provision and reuse templates as much as possible — leaving the human-error factor behind and learning the real importance of standardization.
  • database platform migrationnew Planned and executed a mass migration of EDB PostgreSQL clusters on Kubernetes/OpenShift to Percona (Percona Operator for PostgreSQL). Target clusters were templated as Helm charts in line with our IaC standards, so every migrated database stays fully declarative and reconciled by ArgoCD. Migration steps were scripted and repeatable rather than performed by hand, allowing clusters to move between operators in a controlled, standardized way — and backend templates plus CI/CD were adapted so new services provision on Percona by default.
  • current · platform engineering Having been on the developer's side, I know the pain of deploying to OpenShift. I'm actively building Byte Garden, our internal developer platform: self-service through dynamic forms rendered from Helm chart templates, one-pass provisioning of GitLab, Quay, Vault and ArgoCD, and the filled chart pushed to Git for ArgoCD to apply. Goal: almost no manual work — developers who feel self-sufficient and focus purely on writing code.

Things I've shipped

cargo manifest · 9 items · all delivered

  1. 01

    Jira → Splunk log shipper

    Python

    Kubernetes / OpenShift cron-job application that sends logs from Jira to Splunk.

  2. 02

    Stripe reporting job

    Python

    Cron-job application generating Stripe reports on a weekly and monthly basis, delivering them over the SFTP protocol.

  3. 03

    Reception app

    React

    Frontend for tablets (guests & employees) plus an admin interface for receptionists and security.

  4. 04

    LDAP auth microservice

    .NET

    REST API microservice handling LDAP authorization for the Reception app.

  5. 05

    Secret exchange service

    Go

    Takes heavy or legacy credentials, stores them securely, and exchanges them for a key that CI/CD pipelines use for later retrieval.

  6. 06

    Payment Gateway API pipeline

    Tekton

    The pipeline I'm most proud of: nearly 20 tasks — git clone, security scan, versioning, multiple test types, and a deployment update applied by ArgoCD.

  7. 07

    Provisioning as code

    IaC · Ansible

    EDB cluster provisioning and standardized creation of GitLab subgroups and projects.

  8. 08

    Reusable platform templates

    IaC · Helm

    Backend template (EDB cluster + MBE API + CI/CD), frontend template (MFE with runtime configuration + CI/CD), AMQ cluster, Redis.

  9. 09

    Byte Garden — Internal Developer Platform

    Platform

    The flagship: software catalog of Helm charts, dynamic chart forms with YAML preview, one-pass provisioning and live GitOps monitoring. See the featured section ↑

Tooling & platforms

containers & orchestration

KubernetesOpenShiftPodmanDockerKanikoBuildahSource-to-ImageLinux

ci/cd & gitops

TektonArgoCDHelmAnsibleGit / GitLabSonarQubeHashiCorp Vault

data & platform services

EDB PostgresPercona for PostgreSQLRedisAMQKafkaRH-SSO3Scale API GatewayDeveloper HubSplunk

languages

PythonGoBashReact / JavaScript.NETYAML

Education & training

SEP 2021 — 2023

Informatics — undergraduate studies

Gea College, Ljubljana, Slovenia
gea-college.si

SECONDARY EDUCATION

Mechanical Technician

ŠCC — Šola za strojništvo, mehatroniko in medije, Celje, Slovenia
sc-celje.si

Language skills

Slovenian — native  ·  English — CEFR self-assessment below

ListeningC2
ReadingC2
Spoken interactionC1
WritingC1
Spoken productionB2