# About

> Mehdi Laruelle, Platform Engineer and SRE: AWS, Terraform, HashiCorp Vault, Kubernetes, CI/CD and secrets management.

I am **Mehdi Laruelle**, a **Platform Engineer** and **SRE** based in France.

For ten years I have been building and running the platforms other engineers
deploy on: the infrastructure, the CI/CD pipelines and everything in between
that takes an application from a commit to production. Secrets management is
the subject I keep coming back to and it is what most of the articles here are
about.

I am a firm believer in free knowledge, open and available to everyone.
Sharing what I learn is part of the job as I understand it: I teach, I speak at
conferences and I write in both languages, because good technical material in
French is still harder to find than it should be.

## What I work on

- **AWS**, broadly: serverless, security, monitoring, networking and cost,
  along with the services these articles lean on: IAM and IAM Identity Center,
  S3, CloudFront, API Gateway, Route 53 and ACM. I work on everything around an
  application, multi-region ones included, up to landing zones defined at the
  scale of a whole organisation.
- **Terraform**: modules, the registry protocol and running it from CI
  without a long-lived cloud credential anywhere.
- **HashiCorp Vault**: authentication methods, static and dynamic secrets,
  Encryption as a Service and Vault Agent. I have run Vault in production with
  both Consul and Raft as its storage backend.
- **Kubernetes**: I have operated a cluster in production.
- **CI/CD**: GitLab CI and GitHub Actions, OIDC and short-lived credentials in
  preference to keys.
- **Secrets management** in general, which is the thread running through most
  of what I write.

## Teaching

I have been an **AWS Authorized Instructor** (AAI) for six years: official AWS
courses, plus several years teaching DevOps, cloud and security in university.

I was a **technical reviewer** on three Packt books:

- [HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate (003) Exam Guide](https://www.amazon.fr/HashiCorp-Terraform-Associate-Exam-Guide-ebook/dp/B0CW8B6C5R)
- [AWS Certified Developer – Associate Certification and Beyond](https://www.amazon.fr/Certified-Developer-Associate-Certification-Beyond-ebook/dp/B0B617L8ZX)
- [HashiCorp Infrastructure Automation Certification Guide](https://www.amazon.fr/HashiCorp-Infrastructure-Automation-Certification-Guide-ebook/dp/B092KM7LXC)

## Talks and videos

- **HashiTalks 2021**:
  [Secure Your Terraform Deploys in GitLab-CI with HashiCorp Vault](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tty1w4vX7wI),
  on HashiCorp's channel. The written version is the two-part series here:
  [the pipeline side](https://mehdilaruelle.com/posts/2021/03/secure-your-terraform-deployment-on-aws-with-gitlab-ci-and-vault-pipeline-side/)
  and [the application side](https://mehdilaruelle.com/posts/2021/04/secure-your-terraform-deployment-on-aws-with-gitlab-ci-and-vault-application-side/).
- **Cloud Ouest 2020**:
  [Be secret like a ninja with HashiCorp Vault](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJf4Rx7a5Gw),
  thirty minutes, in French.
- **Pass the SALT 2019**:
  [the recording](https://passthesalt.ubicast.tv/permalink/v125d03af82e7h9ezma4/iframe/),
  which is also embedded in the three-part Vault migration series here.
- **HashiDays Amsterdam 2018**:
  [A Way to Share Secrets in Your Pipeline](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxE0Hkp-lAs),
  on HashiCorp's channel.
- **[Tuto de Revolve - Hashicorp Vault](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4Xu3DGfk60)**,
  a tutorial series in French on the Devoteam Revolve channel.

Upcoming talks and the events I speak at are on
[Sessionize](https://sessionize.com/mehdilaruelle/).

## Community

- **HashiCorp Ambassador** from 2020 to 2025.
- **AWS Community Builder**, 2024.
- **Co-organiser of the francophone HashiCorp User Group (HUG)** for eight
  years.
- My certifications are on [Credly](https://www.credly.com/users/mehdi-laruelle/badges).
- Regular at HashiCorp events, which I write up here:
  [HashiConf 2020](https://mehdilaruelle.com/posts/2020/10/back-to-hashiconf-2020/),
  [HashiDays Paris 2023](https://mehdilaruelle.com/posts/2023/06/back-to-hashidays-paris-2023/) and
  [HashiConf Boston 2024](https://mehdilaruelle.com/posts/2024/10/back-to-hashiconf-boston-2024/).

## This blog

Articles in English and in French, on what I run into at work rather than on
what makes a tidy demo. Most come with a repository you can run yourself. The
whole archive is on the [blog](/posts/) and there is an
[RSS feed](/posts/index.xml).

The site itself is a Hugo static site on AWS, deployed with Terraform, which is
of course [one of the things I have written about](https://mehdilaruelle.com/posts/2023/10/deploy-your-hugo-site-on-aws-with-terraform-v2/).

## Elsewhere

- [GitHub](https://github.com/mehdilaruelle)
- [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/mehdi-laruelle/)
- [Bluesky](https://bsky.app/profile/mehdilaruelle.bsky.social)
- [Sessionize](https://sessionize.com/mehdilaruelle/), my talks
- [Credly](https://www.credly.com/users/mehdi-laruelle/badges), my certifications
- [Keybase](https://keybase.io/mlaruelle)

---

Originally published at https://mehdilaruelle.com/about/