greg@stengel:~$ whoami

Greg Stengel

Staff Infrastructure Engineer · Remote · Palm City, FL

Two decades making clouds behave.

AWS, Kubernetes, observability, and identity — with AI agents becoming part of the toolkit. Building platforms, orchestrating coding agents, and turning “I’ll get to it” into something shipped.

// certifications

Splunk · valid through Apr 2028

Previously certified

  • AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate Expired Dec 2020
  • AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Expired Oct 2024
  • FinOps Certified Practitioner FinOps Foundation · expired Dec 2025

// the arc

  1. 01

    Foundations

    Datacenters, colo, and a hundred web servers. Linux, VMware, Apache, WebSphere, IIS — keep it running, figure out what broke, write it down. Then OpenStack deployments with Ansible, because clicking through infrastructure gets old fast.

  2. 02

    Making the noise useful

    Built Splunk across three datacenters and 2,500+ nodes, with Puppet handling the forwarders. Went deep on clustered deployments, custom integrations, and dashboards people actually used. Later, built out Elastic Cloud observability. Collecting everything is easy; making it useful is the job.

  3. 03

    Building it. Leading it.

    Architected cloud environments, then led the engineers keeping them alive. AWS first, Azure and GCP too. Terraform, backup automation, migrations, fewer noisy alerts, and fewer recurring bills. Kept my hands in the tooling even when the calendar filled with meetings.

  4. 04

    Platform & identity

    Multi-account AWS, EKS across three regions, and the plumbing between Okta, Identity Center, Kubernetes RBAC, and ArgoCD. Terraform/Terragrunt through GitLab CI, Vault for secrets, tighter KMS policies. Make the right access easy and the wrong access difficult.

  5. 05

    Less toil, more shipping

    Python, Bash, Lambda, EventBridge — whatever gets the repeat work off somebody’s plate. Lately, AI agents too, helping turn weeks of delivery into days. Still responsible for what ships. Still writing the runbooks.

// the toolkit

Cloud

AWS home turf · Azure · GCP

AI & Agents

Claude Code · Codex · Cursor · agent orchestration · AI-assisted delivery · OpenClaw

Observability

Splunk · Elastic · Prometheus · Grafana · Datadog

Infrastructure as Code

Terraform · Terragrunt · CloudFormation · Ansible · Puppet

Platform & Delivery

Kubernetes / EKS · Helm · ArgoCD · GitLab CI · GitHub Actions · Jenkins

Security & Identity

IAM Identity Center · Okta · Vault · KMS · AWS Config

Automation & Integration

Python · Bash · Lambda · EventBridge · SSM · Kinesis Firehose

Foundations

Linux / RHEL / Ubuntu · VMware · OpenStack

// signature builds

  1. Multi-datacenter Splunk platform

    Built Splunk across three datacenters and 2,500+ nodes. Puppet handled forwarder rollout; scripts handled new index configuration. Less hand configuration, fewer opportunities to get creative by accident.

  2. Monitoring that earns its keep

    Built a clustered Splunk platform in AWS to monitor customer environments. Custom integrations, 50+ dashboards per customer app, and summary indexing turned scattered resource data into useful answers.

  3. AWS security monitoring pipeline

    Built a CloudFormation stack to send AWS security logs and events through Kinesis Firehose into Splunk HEC, with SNS notifications. Covered root logins, unauthorized API calls, and IAM and network changes. Fewer places to look when something looked wrong.

  4. Backup & compliance automation

    Automated AWS backups and compliance checks with CloudFormation, AWS Config, Cloud Custodian, and tagging standards. Replaced third-party backup tooling with native AWS Backup, taking thousands out of recurring costs.

  5. Hybrid file-sync pipeline

    Connected SFTP and SMB workflows across AWS and on-prem using Lambda, S3, and DynamoDB. Automated file mapping and sync so moving files didn’t need to be somebody’s job.

  6. Fewer IPs, smaller bills

    Built automation to migrate and consolidate public IPs, reducing per-application IP costs. Small pieces of infrastructure add up when the meter never stops.

  7. Identity modernization

    Replaced legacy IAM access with Okta-backed Identity Center across a multi-account AWS environment. Reusable Terraform/Terragrunt modules and GitLab CI made permission changes repeatable. Least privilege, maintained in code.

  8. Multi-region EKS access

    Operated EKS across three AWS regions, connecting Identity Center access to Kubernetes RBAC and ArgoCD deployments. Managed Vault secrets and ingress alongside it, with runbooks so the access path didn’t live in one person’s head.

// on the record

One of the most talented engineers I’ve ever worked with — instrumental in building key automation and reporting systems, and always willing to teach others.
— DevOps / SRE team lead
He automated the entire Splunk setup for thousands of servers, self-taught, and documented it so well it was still in use two years later.
— former manager
Detail-oriented with a broad set of technical skills — always eager to learn, and never backs down from a challenge.
— VP, managed services
Dove into technologies he had no background in — Splunk, Python, cloud — and quickly became the person the team relied on.
— project manager

// after hours

homelab · all green

// read the receipts

the blog

// the stack

It’s the wall drifting behind all this. Hover a logo to name it — cloud, containers, observability, and a closet full of Linux.

// find me