Belhadj Kessas
EN FR

Infrastructure that rebuilds itself from Git.

I'm Belhadj Kessas, a DevOps engineer. I run the Kubernetes platforms behind 100,000+ IoT sensors at Montpellier Méditerranée Métropole, and I help teams take the same control of theirs.

Write to me See my work

Remote first, on site when the project needs it. French and English.

Selected work

Montpellier's Smart City platform

One of France's largest municipal IoT networks — air quality, water and energy metering, waste, lighting, mobility — for 500,000 people. I moved it to Kubernetes clusters on the Métropole's own servers, open source from the kernel up and driven entirely from Git.

100,000+
IoT sensors in production
4
Kubernetes clusters, one Git repository
0
manual steps to build a full cluster
1 min
from a silent gateway to an alert
infra-repo / main a1f3c9e scale api to 3 replicas 7be2104 add loki retention 0c9d4e1 bump cilium to 1.16 5d61a0b bootstrap prod cluster Argo CD Synced OutOfSync prod cluster node-1 node-2 node-3 3 nodes · RKE2 · Cilium infra-repo / main a1f3c9e scale api to 3 replicas 7be2104 add loki retention Argo CD Synced OutOfSync prod cluster node-1 node-2 node-3
What a git push does on these platforms: Argo CD compares the repository with the cluster, then brings every node back to what Git declares.

What I can do for you

On your own servers or on EKS, GKE and AKS. Each project has a written scope, lands in your Git and ends with a handover.

Platform audit
An outside review of your Kubernetes — security, backups, deployments, alerting, upgrades, costs — and a prioritised plan.
GitOps setup
Cluster state in Git with Argo CD or Flux: promotion between environments, drift detection, tested rollback.
Observability
Prometheus, Grafana and Loki, or Mimir for several teams. Alerts that fire before your users notice.
Kubernetes on your own servers
Clusters on bare metal, Proxmox or vSphere, built from code — or workloads moved off a managed cloud.
IoT and LoRaWAN platforms
ChirpStack on Kubernetes, gateways, MQTT and time-series pipelines at fleet scale.

By project at a fixed price, as monthly support, or as a named Kubernetes expert on an IT firm's client project.

Open-source tools only: no licences, no lock-in — to a vendor or to me.

Digital sovereignty

Know where your data lives and which laws apply to it, and keep the freedom to change providers.

For companies and public bodies alike: data protection rules, pricing changes and vendor decisions all matter less when you own your stack.

Dependency map and plan
What relies on outside providers, and a plan ranked by risk and effort.
Infrastructure you control
Kubernetes on your own servers or with a provider in your jurisdiction, managed from Git.
Open-source building blocks
Linux, Proxmox, PostgreSQL, Keycloak, Grafana — handed over to your team.

Already done at Montpellier Méditerranée Métropole. See the platform

Tools I use every day

CKA (Certified Kubernetes Administrator) in progress, 2026.

Kubernetes
RKE2, Rancher, k3s, Cilium, MetalLB, Rook-Ceph, Envoy Gateway, Helm
GitOps & IaC
Argo CD, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, OpenTofu, Terraform, Ansible
Observability
Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, Mimir, Alloy, Alertmanager, Zabbix
Infrastructure
Linux, Proxmox, VMware vSphere, Cloudflare
IoT
ChirpStack v4, LoRaWAN, MQTT, NVIDIA Jetson
Code
Python, Bash, Rust, SQL

Tell me about your infrastructure.

Where it runs, how you deploy, what gets in the way. The first call is free, and I answer every message, in French or English.

contact@belhadj.dev

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