In a world increasingly reliant on digital infrastructure, the reliability of government services has become a matter of public trust. When these systems fail, the effects can ripple far beyond technical inconvenience. For millions of U.S. veterans, online platforms are now the primary point of access to healthcare, benefits, and support services. Ensuring that these digital services remain available and secure has become a responsibility not just of government policy, but of engineering precision.
Recent industry reports point to a complex reality: while 80% of public institutions are shifting mission-critical workloads to the cloud, more than half struggle with outdated disaster recovery protocols. The gap between digital ambition and operational readiness creates tension in the public sector. This tension exists between the promises of these platforms and their actual ability to deliver.
Within this space of quiet urgency, one technologist has been shaping a different kind of response. Swati Karni, Principal Cloud Engineer and Site Reliability Expert at a prominent technology contractor serving U.S. federal agencies, doesn’t speak in sweeping pronouncements or grand declarations. Her focus is precise, her approach methodical. What sets her apart isn’t a vision of the future; it is the architecture of how we get there.
Tasked with supporting one of the largest federal agencies dedicated to veteran care, Swati’s remit is formidable: to design, maintain, and evolve the government cloud infrastructure responsible for serving millions. These systems must remain operational not just under ideal conditions but under the most adverse conditions, during regional outages, cyber incidents, or critical updates. They must be secure, compliant, efficient, and above all, resilient.
Swati’s work began with a clear recognition of the stakes. “This isn’t about convenience,” she says. “It’s about continuity, about people depending on these systems for vital access.”
To meet that need, she led the implementation of a disaster recovery architecture that goes beyond standard protocols. Using Terraform, a popular infrastructure-as-code tool, she developed automated recovery templates integrated with Azure Site Recovery. These templates support one-click failover for virtual machines and storage. This simplifies the recovery process, reducing it from a multi-day process to one measured in hours.
The shift wasn’t cosmetic. It redefined expectations. Where previous disaster recovery drills could expose flaws in manual processes, Karni’s automation introduced consistency and repeatability. The result was not only improved compliance with recovery time and point objectives, but also a new level of readiness for the teams involved.
The approach embedded disaster recovery into the infrastructure deployment logic. Swati ensured that resilience became an inherent property of the systems being built, not a separate feature to be tested later. However, resilience in the cloud is only one side of the equation. The other is cost.
As public agencies expand their digital presence, cost management has become as critical as uptime. Swati tackled this with equal discipline. She led a comprehensive analysis of cloud usage patterns across more than 150 Azure instances. She identified inefficiencies, including underutilized virtual machines, misaligned resource sizing, and instances left running during idle periods.
Leveraging the Azure pricing calculator, she implemented a reserved instance strategy and introduced automated VM shutdown schedules. To support decision-making, she, along with her team, integrated Turbonomics, a performance and cost optimization platform, to generate dynamic usage insights. The savings were significant: up to 60% reduction in cloud expenditures and an estimated $200,000 in annual cost avoidance.
Her work didn’t stop at optimization. Recognizing the fragmented nature of deployment workflows across federal IT, Swati helped design and implement a fully integrated infrastructure pipeline. Combining Terraform with Ansible and GitHub repositories, she built a system that allowed automated provisioning, configuration, and deployment of cloud workloads.
The benefits weren’t merely technical. Teams that had previously worked in silos, DevOps, architecture, and compliance, could now collaborate on a unified, traceable deployment process. The reduction in manual effort was measurable: build times dropped by half, and deployment consistency rose sharply.
Security and compliance, always front of mind in public sector environments, were also addressed in detail. Swati implemented access controls using Azure Entra ID. She also configured web application firewalls, private endpoints, and cloud-native firewalls to secure application data flows. These layers of control ensured that the infrastructure met federal standards while maintaining operational agility.
Taken together, Swati’s efforts present a coherent philosophy: infrastructure should serve both technical integrity and public accountability. What might appear to some as invisible backend work is, in her hands, the backbone of public trust.
While she avoids taking personal credit for these changes, her role in leading and executing these transformations is difficult to overstate. She has become a linchpin in her organization’s modernization efforts. She enables systems to function smoothly, even when no one is watching.
When asked what drives her, Swati reflects briefly. “I think about the people on the other end. Veterans trying to schedule a medical appointment, a spouse trying to access support. When those systems work, no one notices. That is how it should be.“
In the rapidly evolving world of government cloud infrastructure, where flashier metrics often measure innovation, Swati Karni’s approach stands out for its restraint. Her work isn’t defined by disruption, but by reliability, not by speed, but by permanence. And in the public sector, where the cost of failure is borne by the people who can least afford it, that might be the most important contribution of all.
