Salman Farhat

Cloud Solution Architect

Technical lead for a team of 4 cloud engineers, designing, building, and deploying two production projects on Azure — a smart city simulation platform and a drone OTA update system.

• Designed a fully containerized distributed system — Next.js frontend, Flask backend, and a Node.js real-time service consuming events from Azure Event Hubs and broadcasting via WebSockets — orchestrated on AKS with ingress controllers and Azure API Management as the unified external gateway.
• Applied zero-trust principles by storing sensitive credentials in Azure Key Vault and Kubernetes Secrets, with services retrieving secrets at runtime via the Key Vault SDK, and using Service Principals for secure, passwordless authentication to ACR and Azure resources.
• Cut Cosmos DB spend by 50%+ by analyzing RU/s consumption patterns via Azure Monitor, identifying an over-provisioning gap, and migrating collections to serverless pricing using Azure Data Factory pipelines with post-migration validation.
• Compared different Azure compute services such as AKS, ACP, and Virtual Machine Scale Sets against cost, scalability, and complexity.
• Evaluated AKS, ACP, and VMSS against cost, scalability, and complexity; selected AKS as primary compute layer. Designed and built a production-grade cluster with dedicated node pools, RBAC, network policies, and HPA.
• Passed Microsoft Azure Administrator Associate (AZ-104) during this role.

PhD Candidate

• Designed an innovative tool enabling dynamic reconfiguration of cloud applications, addressing operational challenges across major platforms (Heroku, AWS, Azure).
• Developed a comprehensive reconfiguration management solution that simplifies deployment updates by modeling and respecting component dependencies, reducing configuration drift and deployment errors.
• Presented the reconfiguration tool to cloud infrastructure companies for monitoring and managing datacenter operations at scale.
• Published multiple papers in international conferences (IEEE ICSA-C 2022, Coordination Models and Languages 2023) validating the reconfiguration management solution.

Lecturer

Taught courses across multiple undergraduate and graduate programs: Web Technology, Networks, Object-Oriented Programming & Design Patterns, Distributed Systems, and Shell Scripting.

Research Intern

• Contributed to enhancing resilience of distributed learning systems against Byzantine failures.

Research Intern

• Extended Ipanema, a domain-specific language for multi-core process scheduling.

University of Lille – Inria

Grenoble Alpes University (ENSIMAG)

Chocolate E-Commerce Website

Designed and deployed a full-stack web platform containerized with Docker and orchestrated on Kubernetes, comprising a Next.js frontend, Go backend, and PostgreSQL database. I have also implemented a full CI/CD pipeline using Jenkins. The project is live at: https://chocolate-frontend-liard.vercel.app →

Chocolate Tempering Machine (IoT + Cloud)

Constructed a chocolate tempering machine from scratch. I integrated a microcontroller to push real-time observed data (water temperature vs. cacao butter temperature) to Azure IoT Hub. In addition, I built a containerized backend consumer to ingest streaming data into PostgreSQL and implemented a scheduled analytics job to study the relationship between water temperature and chocolate/cacao butter temperature.

Content Creator (11K+ followers)

Created educational content explaining chocolate tempering principles and documenting the step-by-step construction of a chocolate tempering machine from scratch.

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/salmanfarhat_/ →

Attendance Application

Developed an OCR-based system for the Lebanese University that scans and reads student ID cards to automatically record attendance into a database.

Multi-Threaded Social Network Server

A multi-threaded server for social network use cases developed in C, handling concurrent client connections with POSIX threading.

Chat Application

Messaging system built using Java Remote Method Invocation (RMI), demonstrating distributed object communication.