About

About to depart Tuktoyaktuk, NWT

During an Overland trip to Tuktoyaktuk, NT

Interested in chatting ? Email is the best contact method: here.

Background

  • 15+ years focused on implementing, supporting and automating Enterprise business & web centric applications.
  • 9+ years leading technical teams, driving solutions & processes while automating Enterprise Application implementations.
  • Excel at working in a hybrid managerial / technical role, often working directly with product managers, business leaders and development teams.
  • Built a web/app DevOps team from the ground-up, scaling to 8 headcount dispersed across the globe (San Diego, Toronto, India) @ Qualcomm, Inc
  • Currently reside in Las Vegas, actively running my own consulting company, Apcension.com
  • Contribute / present at the local Kubernetes & Docker meet-up group here in Las Vegas.
  • Strive to attend the major conferences like DockerCon and KubeCon each year.

Current Project Tech Stack

  • Sole DevOps Engineer / Architect.
  • 10 node Kubernetes cluster via CoreOS on bare-metal.
    • Multi-master installation (3) with numerous workers.  Running the latest stable.
  • Leverage Kargo, based on Ansible, for managing Infra changes and custom service deployments.
  • Leverage Traefik and Nginx Ingress controllers for TCP, HTTP, UDP ingress to the cluster.
  • Installed Gluster on-top of kubernetes for dynamic PVC provisioning (since we’re on Bare metal).
    • Allows pods with persistent needs to move around the cluster, if needed.
  • Leverage the typical hipster, Grafana, InfluxDB and ELK stack for monitoring and performance metrics along with external services.
  • Run Jenkins on-top of Kubernetes to drive all automation with web-hooks tied into our Git system.  Leverage latest pipeline / multi-branch pipeline functionality for managing all aspects of the pipeline via Git (Jenkinsfile)

Past Technical Toolsets and Competencies

  • AWS, GCE and bare metal installations
  • CoreOS, Ubuntu, CentOS
  • Kubernetes, Mesos / Marathon
  • Docker, Rocket, Vagrant, AWS, Openstack, VMWare
  • Akamai, CloudFlare, Cloudfront, S3
  • Ansible, Custom PAAS, IAAS and config management stacks
  • Jenkins and Circle CI
  • Traefik, Nginx, Apache, Haproxy
  • Tomcat, WebSphere, WebLogic, WordPress, Drupal
  • SOLR, ElasticSearch
  • Python, Lua, Bash, PHP
  • CVS, Perforce, Git
  • Ubuntu, RHEL, Solaris
  • Redis, Memcache, MongoDB, MySQL, Oracle

Professional Experience

2016  Founded Apcension.com – IT Consulting Company

  • Work with Fortune 500 clients around the globe to enhance their DevOps processes and increase stability of their systems.
  • Latest client project was tasked to build and manage their infrastructure for Autonomous,  self-driving vehicles.  Managing the intricacies of backend data-science systems, highly-scalable front-end API services and everything in-between.
  • Have been strongly focused on micro-service architecture the past few years and enabling containerization for improved portability and security.
  • Work with clients to identify the proper tool sets and infrastructure principals per project (Kubernetes, swarm, CoreOS, AWS, GCE, etc).
  • Continuously work with clients to leverage the right technology to best align with business goals and project objectives.

2015 – 2016   Sr Platform DevOps @ Teradata Labs, Inc

  • Served as the sole DevOps point of contact within the new cloud R&D division, constantly working to promote infrastructure automation and best practices
  • Provided architecture patterns for core infrastructure components of the UDA platform and products
  • Built 100% of the automated platform based on Mesos and Marathon.  The platform serves as the core of the new big data streaming product the team is driving, Teradata Listener.
  • Integrated Kafka, Cassandra, ELK amongst others into the stack based on architecture requirements for our custom streaming product.
  • Driving effort to containerize our various micro-services via Docker and Jenkins, builds automatically trigger based on code submissions to our internal Github repo’s.
  • Installation and configuration of the product and platform were designed to be run as a single-click process by our eventual customers / clients, foregoing the need for professional services to be involved (a first for the company).
  • Leverage Ansible for all install and config aspects of the various core platform systems.
  • Leverage Vagrant for local development, packer builds and integrating existing Ansble playbooks for infrastructure automation testing.
  • Built out an ISO / AMI building pipeline for bundling all installable assets of the core platform components into versioned images.  Leverage Packer to handle the heavy lifting and existing Ansible logic.
  • Leverage Openstack and AWS as the fundamental IAAS stack of which automation runs across our builds and installation of our upcoming product.
  • Wrote a number of plugins and custom processes to integrate w/ internal legacy systems, i.e. DNS.  Most are written in Python and offer hooks to Ansible roles / tasks.

2014 – Sr DevOps @ Z4 Poker, LLC

  • Driving effort to containerize the application stack, tightly integrating the build / deploy process with Docker
  • Effort stems from the desire to migrate services internally from AWS, and eventually running in a hybrid model.
  • Stack is already automated via Jenkins and Ansible; so massaging these processes along with new integrations w/ Packer forms our container build process.
  • Leverage Consul for internal service discovery, port discovery and monitoring. This enables tools like regulator and consul-haproxy in relation to docker containers / services. When coupled w/ Ansible to move containers around, we get a relatively auto-magic setup with minimal re-configuration of any associated services (ie, LB’s).
  • Authored a custom notification process in python, based around services defined in consul. As consul has become the defacto standard of what is where, my notification process identifies any critical services and then notifies a service in pagerduty. Also leverage the kv store to track pagerduty incidents, manage blackouts / maintenance mode, etc.
  • Leverage Vagrant for local services testing and integration to streamline developer lifecycle.

2013 – DevOps Consultant @ Intuit, Inc.

  • Short term project to migrate an internally hosted API gateway application out to AWS.
  • Built numerous python processes that leveraged the AWS Boto libs to streamline AMI registration/de-registration, automating CloudFormation builds, hooking into Route53 for multi-region deployments (blue/green deployments), integrated new processes into Jenkins for end-user automated deployments.
  • Leveraged Chef to automated the Application and middleware installation/configuration
  • Proposed and evolved their existing build process to leverage AMI images. Essentially splitting the former process into three distinct methods: building AMI’s, QA signoff on the new AMI, deploying approved/versioned AMI’s into a specific environment. This significantly helped reduce potential errors with auto-scaling and dependency management in live environments.
  • Leverage the following AWS components on a daily basis: VPC, custom NAT instances, ELB, Cloudformation, AutoScaling Groups, rolling update deployments via CloudFormation updates, proper encryption techniques, role based IAM policies to prevent distributing access keys and secrets.

2005 – 2012  IT Engineer, Senior Staff @ Qualcomm, Inc.

  • Resigned July 2012 for some much needed timeoff to travel and personal projects
  • Built a devOps team from scratch to a global, 8 member team (San Diego, Toronto & India).
  • Managed apps across 7 diverse Business Units, ranging from large billing applications, internal HR systems to www.qualcomm.com.
  • Instilled a strong focus towards process automation, driving efficiency and technology standards across our middleware frameworks.
  • Built a custom Application Platform to provide a RESTful interface for dev teams, app owners and our admins.  Leveraged custom Nginx/Lua/Redis for dynamic proxying, encompassed automated monitoring, metrics and notifications.
  • Lead R&D efforts, worked on defining inhouse IAAS stack, worked with Enterprise Architect team on offerings spanning the IT org.
  • Defined standards across Bash and PHP frameworks leveraged for our automation toolsets
  • Documented and standardized the periodic security assessments across our middleware stacks.  This included formal documentation for our customers along with technical details pertaining to the implementation/fixes.  Managed ad-hoc security resolutions based on critical vulnerabilities.
  • Expert at troubleshooting multi-tier bottlenecks along with scalability / performance issues. Comfortable instrumenting application run-times, running network snoops and solving technical conundrums.
  • Experienced working across SSO, SAML and custom OAuth workflows.

2004-2005  IT Consultant @ Rapidigm/Fujitsu

  • Working on-site for Bunge North America driving their WebSphere Portal implementation.
  • Built vertical and horizontally scalable environments.
  • Automated the ability to push changes between environments.  Encompassed managing WebSphere level settings along with Portal specific settings.  Wrote Jacl and xmlaccess scripts, accordingly.
  • Integrated Teamsite workflows across the development Portal environment.  Support perl and xml/xsl to an interactive test suite.

2001 – 2004  Technical Web Admin @ Nationwide Insurance

  • Administer approximately 40 diverse J2EE web applications.  Site traffic ranges from 150 internal customers to over 900,000 external financial customers (mutual funds).
  • Assisted with design and lead implementation of our new internal HR environment for the entire enterprise – 45,000+ employees.  Environment is running under Weblogic and tuxedo, both configured for PeopleTools 8.1.19.
  • Expanded HR environment to provide access for employees from the internet (those without VPN access). Secured external access on Sun One webservers utilizing RSA Cleartrust with our new B2E directory services infrastructure.