Introducing myself

My name is Andreas Petrov and I am a freelance consultant from the beautiful Westerwald. I share the belief that companies, authorities, and organizations benefit from the use of Cloud technologies and solve challenges in a better way.

I have many years of experience consulting global enterprises in a wide range of industries and have played a key role in one of the largest Microsoft Azure- and VMware-based Cloud transformation projects in Europe.

I look forward to our joint journey!

Andreas Petrov Signature
Andreas Petrov

My Approach

In my projects, I follow best practices and proven methods to deliver the best results. My service offering is oriented around the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure. I am happy to support you either in individual phases or end-to-end during the entire life cycle of the introduction of cloud technologies in your company.

Strategy

Definition of your Cloud strategy. Together with you, I create your Cloud strategy in joint workshops with stakeholders and align it with your business strategy.

Planning

Planning your Cloud migration. I support you in assessing your IT infrastructure, define migration approaches based on the 5R model and plan your Cloud migration.

Deployment

Design of your Cloud architecture and provision of a landing zone. I design your cloud architecture taking your Cloud strategy into account and provide a landing zone for the migration.

Migration

Migration of your workloads to the Cloud. Together with application owners, I implement the migration plan and support you with the migration of workloads to your Cloud environment.

Governance

Development and implementation of Cloud governance. I support you in defining a governance framework and processes for your Cloud environment.

Operations

Operation of your Cloud environment. I support you in setting up your Cloud Operation Team as well as establishing processes to ensure optimal operation of your Cloud environment.

Selected Projects

06/2021 – 12/2022
Cloud Migration Architect

As part of a large-scale global hybrid cloud transformation project of several globally distributed data centers into three target environments (Azure, GCP, private cloud based on OpenStack), I was responsible for:

  • Design and implementation of target application architectures to fulfill technical, regulatory, and contractual requirements leading various small PoC teams of up to 5 people with a special focus on high availability, disaster recovery, performance, and cost optimization. Applications were based on various technologies including SAP HANA, SQL Server, MySQL, SAP MaxDB and SAP NetWeaver.
  • Automating deployment process of systems following Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and automated Configuration Management (CM) approaches using Terraform, Ansible, and Chef to reduce manual efforts up to 90 %.
  • Design and implement mass migration approaches based on storage replication, snapshot, and disk cloning technologies to reduce manual migration efforts up to 95 %.
  • Resolved blockers for build and migration teams to safeguard the migration timeline and provided support during migrations

Technologies: Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), OpenStack, NetApp, Terraform, Chef, Ansible, Jenkins, Rundeck, SAP HANA, SAP MaxDB, SAP NetWeaver, Pacemaker

03/2021 – 06/2021
Cloud Solution Architect
Solution design for Microsoft Azure and SAP environments supporting the pre-sales team with a focus on medium-sized customers and public sector.

Technologies: Microsoft Azure, SAP

07/2019 – 09/2020
Project Manager
Initiated and managed the first wave of a complex transformation project to drive the client’s Cloud First strategy. Overall project scope included a global rollout in more than 40 countries, 200 sites, and more than 15,000 users leading a team of 15 people and managed partner relationships with various partners and clients.

Technologies: Microsoft Azure, VMware vSphere, NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP, Talon FAST, Dell PowerEdge, Windows Server, DFS Namespaces

08/2018 – 06/2019
Cloud Solution Architect
Architected and piloted a highly scalable, modern Cloud-based solution to manage over one petabyte of data. Organized and conducted workshops with various vendors and client stakeholders.

Technologies: Microsoft Azure, VMware vSphere, NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP, Talon FAST, Dell PowerEdge, Windows Server, DFS Namespaces

04/2018 – 05/2018
Cloud Transformation & Migration Consultant
Preparation, plan, coordination and migration of security relevant critical workloads into an Azure-based DMZ environment.

Technologies: Microsoft Azure, FortiGate

11/2017 – 03/2018
SAP Transformation- & Migration Consultant
Coordinated the migration of 100 SAP systems into a Hybrid Cloud environment consisting of Microsoft Azure and VMware. The migration included various release versions ranging from 4.5B until ERP 6.0 EHP 8 with various databases including SAP HANA, SAP ASE, and SAP MaxDB.

Technologies: Microsoft Azure, SAP HANA, SAP ASE, SAP MaxDB, SAP ERP, SAP Solution Manager, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server

11/2015 – 10/2017
Backend Development Lead
Backend development lead for an SAP HANA performance optimization and monitoring addon reducing the total cost of ownership by up to 60 %. Introduced performance boosts by an additional 20 % using bin packing algorithms and optimizing delta merge operations.

Technologies: SAP HANA, SAP HANA XSA, SAP HANA PAL, SAPUI5, Java, JavaScript

10/2016 – 03/2017
Analytics Consultant
Lead the development of an IoT facility management project for smart parking.

Technologies: SAP HANA, SAP HANA XSA, SAP HANA PAL, SAP HANA Modelling, SAPUI5, Java, JavaScript, Ionic, AngularJS