Greater Adelaide Area
Kubernetes Container Orchestration, Prometheus Metrics/Monitoring, Amazon Web Services, AWS EKS, DevOps, Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery, The Go Programming Language, Linux System Administration, Rancher, NixOS
As a Staff Devops Engineer I moved to work remotely as a member of the US-based Learn SaaS Infrastructure team responsible for the design and implementation of improvements to the Cloud infrastructure upon which Blackboard's SaaS solution for Learn operates and supporting the infrastructure needed for the product's development teams. Based in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) environment, my role has primarily involved leading the introduction of Kubernetes as the preferred solution for container orchestration in the organisation. This provides a platform for supporting a movement towards Microservices in extending the capabilities of the Learn SaaS platform. This effort has seen the successful implementation of multiple regional, AWS-based Kubernetes clusters operating production Microservices. Through this implementation, a strong focus was the development of infrastructure metrics and monitoring with Prometheus, to improve the platform's visibility. This has extended to other components outside of Kubernetes. In addition, considerable work occurred in conjunction with development teams, to bring the previously Mesos-based product build infrastructure into an autoscaling Kubernetes platform. This has achieved significant advantages in terms of build efficiency while minimising previously wasted resources. Work with Performance Testing Engineering teams in Shanghai has also resulted in an effort to move container-based performance regression testing to into Kubernetes infrastructure, vastly simplifying performance testing management and processes.
After the acquisition of NetSpot by Blackboard, I began working remotely as a member of US-based teams supporting the company's core Learning Management System product: Blackboard Learn. I was primarily involved as a member of the Continuous Integration team, responsible for the upkeep and continual improvement of the Learn product's significant build and integration processes and its required infrastructure footprint. A significant part of this role saw me lead the evaluation and subsequent implementation of container-based builds running under Apache Mesos. This improved the scalability, efficiency and reproducibility of the overall build process responsible for the vast majority of product build load. This required work across a vast array of different components and technologies and involved the configuration and operation of Mesos clusters, introduction of infrastructure monitoring with Prometheus and the implementation of various integration services in the environment with the Go language. As part of the move into containerised build technology we were able to seamlessly move the vast majority of build load from legacy datacenter infrastructure into Amazon Web Services (AWS).
I worked as part of small team of architects to completely reimplement NetSpot's hosting infrastructure as part of a datacenter platform relocation. This work involved the introduction of approaches such as Infrastructure as Code with Puppet, Continuous Integration and systematic Code Review tools for infrastructure, which was then also adopted by software teams. This role saw me implement an object storage solution based on the Go language and Riak database technology that integrated successfully with large-scale, hosted Moodle sites allowing a highly-available, efficient file storage platform.
A restructure of the Technology Department at Internode saw the creation of a Technology Design Group. In the early stages of a significant restructure for the organisation, I was awarded a role as a Software Domain Designer within that group.
As the Technical Lead for Integration and Middleware in the Software Engineering team at Internode, I was responsible for introducing and leading the design and implementation of the software integration capability within the organisation. The platform put in place to fulfil that capability continues to serve various key projects, including a large-scale CRM integration and significant B2B interfaces.
My role as an Analyst/Programmer with Internode saw me contribute to ongoing development in the organisation’s supporting systems. I have had the opportunity to draw on my experience, as well as gain new skills, especially in the areas of software performance and scalability. I have contributed to Java and Perl development and have spent significant time in enhancing existing systems, to allow them to scale to the increasing demands of the business.
As an Analyst/Programmer on the EFM project I was responsible for analysing the existing application architecture and recommending and implementing modifications, to bring the project closer in line with current Java/J2EE best practices.