Vasudevan Perumal

Experience

System Development Engineer II | Amazon OpsTech & Robotics | Austin, TX | Dec 2023 - Present (1 yr 5 mos)

Led the development of the OS Bakery, a CI mechanism for OS builds, and a toolchain of dev-tools for local builds. Fully automating git merge to build, and publish of OS artifacts to device deployment.
Designed a framework of abstractions for OS customization in the Amazon context, making OS customization accessible to cloud-native engineers, reducing time to prototype for teams, from days to a couple of hours.
Spearheaded development of AmazonEdgeOS, first ever custom Linux distribution at Amazon Robotics. Security and reliability as core tenets, we implemented A/B Updates, TPM2 full disk encryption, etc.
Designed a virtual OS testing service enabling developers and integration testing frameworks, to spin up test instances, run tests, and teardown instances on-demand, built with libvirt, vagrant, and pytest.
Developed abstractions, for teams to leverage TPM2 root of trust for Cloud service and Wifi EAP registration.

System Development Engineer I | Amazon OpsTech & Robotics | Austin, TX | Jul 2021 - Dec 2023 (2 yrs 6 mos)

Introduced a mechanism to build custom Ubuntu images at Amazon Robotics, enabling teams to “shift-left” their dev and testing process. Leading to a 200% increase in iteration velocity in developing solutions.
Introduced Image-based Provisioning at Amazon FCs, reducing device provisioning time from 45 mins to 6 mins. Done through a custom boot initrd, pre-built OS images, with a in-house developed installer.
Developed dev-tools, and CI/CD mechanism for internal developer teams to package their code into debian packages, and automating the process from git merge to debian package build and publishing.
Helped build a mechanism to vend internal Debian Repos to 200K edge devices. Using AWS Cloudfront CDN.

Web Systems Operations Intern | Americaneagle.com | Des Plaines, IL | June 2020 - Dec 2020 (7 mos)

Built a python app translating Cisco LoadBalancer, to A10 LoadBalancer configurations, for a migration initiative. The app automated a 2 month initiative to 2 weeks across our Colo DataCenters.
Developed a bash/powershell script to automate clearing RAID config of disks on CentOS 6 servers, reducing SysAdmin’s time to recycle drives from 20 mins to 1 min.

Programming Languages: Python, Bash, Rust, Typescript
Cloud Tech: AWS Lambda, DynamoDB, API Gateway, Codebuild, Cloudformation, IoT, SSM, Greengrass, SNS, Kinesis, Cloudwatch, CodePipelines, ECS, CloudFront, KMS.
Tools, and Platforms: systemd, mkosi, yocto, Containerization(Docker,Podman,systemd-nspawn), Flatpak, Debian/APT package management, btrfs, micro-repo management, Smithy API Framework, HashiCorp Packer and Vagrant, libvirt, qemu, MQTT SDKs for AWS IoT, and Greengrass.
Technologies and Concepts: Trusted Platform Module(TPM2), Remote Attestation, Immutable Linux(A/B updates, OsTree), Linux Distribution Management(Ubuntu, Fedora, NixOS), API Design and Data Modelling.

Masters in Electrical and Computer Engineering | Illinois Tech | Chicago, IL | Aug 2019 - May 2021
- Coursework: Advanced Computer Networking, Cybersecurity, Network Security, IoT, Wireless and 5G Networks
Bachelor in Electronics and Communication Engineering | SRM IST | Chennai, India | Aug 2015 - May 2019
- Coursework: Computer Networking, Communication Design, Mobile Networks, MicroProcessors, and MicroControllers

Made upstream contributions to TPM2 TCG Linux project, fixing their PKCS11 teardown process, available now in all major linux distros.
Open sourced internal projects, like aws-ready-edge-os, a public fork of AmazonEdgeOS, aws-mkosi-builder, an AWS native OS build Infra library. Ecrmedataextractor, an OCI compliant tool to gather SBOM data.
Made minor contributions to monitord, a Dbus based systemd monitoring tool, and mkosi(OS build tool).
Attended All Systems Go 2024, foundational linux userspace conference.
Member of the pyTexas community.

Smartphone APP for Continuous Observation of Pollution Levels Due to Particulate Matter Measured by Laser Mie Scattering
- Collaborated with 4 researchers in developing a mobile IoT pollution monitoring system that uses Mie Scattering Technique to measure particulate matter-based pollution to gauge living conditions of an area.
- Publication link here
Effects of ambient air pollution on respiratory and eye illness in population living in Kodungaiyur, Chennai
- Publication link here