Nuremberg, Bavaria, Germany
As Senior Hosting Engineer, I moved back to a more hands-on role, dealing with a wide variety of operational tasks. These mostly revolved around the move of our whole infrastructure to Google Cloud Platform within less than 2 years. My tasks included: - Writing Puppet and Terraform code to migrate workloads to GCP, making sure every new project at GCP is fully automated via Infrastructure as code - Assisting external developers with hosting their game servers at GCP / AWS / Azure. When such game projects ended, ensured that the infrastructure was properly phased out and decommissioned - Reviewing and Scaling workloads that had already been migrated to GCP, to save on hosting costs and ensure proper performance
When my team suddenly found itself without a teamlead, I took over those duties "for the duration", officially becoming Head of Hosting a few months later. The team had grown to 10 people, as the central IT team for Spil Games, and responsible for 800 servers by now, some of which located in our own private cloud run via Openstack. As Head of Hosting, my responsibilities included: - Being the people manager for a team of 10 - Capacity Planning for our datacenter - Assisting and Advising external game develoment studios in hosting their gamservers. This often included a "hands on" approach to make sure their infrastructure was reliable and scalable, as the success of the respective games depended on those servers. We hosted around 30 such gameserver projects on GCP, AWS and Azure, ensuring that Tech was never the bottleneck for the release of those games. - Assisting the CTO and Director Tech in Evaluating and Planning a move of our whole server infrastructure to a public cloud provider (GCP) - Guiding our development teams towards DevOps practices, helping them take over more responsibilities for their code
I was invited to join Spil Games as a System Engineer, after its subsidiary and my former employer qforge had been shut down. As part of the Hosting team, I was responsible for ensuring a high availability of our server infrastructure, which served our web portals to over 100 million users a month. Our team accomplished this despite frequent organizational changes, and being down to only 3 team members at one time. This involved close collaboration with our Release Engineering, Infrastructure and various development teams. Working together with the network- and database engineers in our team, I took over mostly operational duties. These included: - Joining the 'support shift' rotation, which involved 24/7 on-call duty, for a week at a time. - Introducing a Helpdesk system in the form of Zendesk, to manage the growing number of internal support requests towards our team, due to the company's fast growth - Writing Puppet modules and recipes to make sure our infrastructure stays highly automated - Migrating developer VMs to a newly created Openstack cluster - Training developers in writing simple Puppet modules for their applications, to manage application configuration consistently - Assisting internal development teams wherever possible.
As one of two System Engineers at qforge, I was responsible for taking care of the 30 workstations at the company office, as well as around 20 Linx web- and gameservers required by the company's games. Quickly, I was asked to help out the Hosting team of qforge's parent company Spil Games, In that capacity, I was part of Spil Games' on call rotation and helping take care of their over 500 Linux servers. During my time at qforge, my duties involved: - Ensuring the High Availability of the Java - based server infrastructure required for the games. - Assisting in planning of releases for the gameserver software - Migrating the version control system from SVN to git, and training developers in its use - Writing Puppet modules to automate the deployment and maintenance of the gameservers - Migrating all gameservers and databases to Spil Games' datacenter, while avoiding downtime or loss of user data
My career in IT started at this mechanical engineering company, with an apprenticeship as Computer Science Expert, which I finished in 2010. As a System Administrator, I was part of a 2 person team and responsible for around 100 PC workstations and 20 servers. For the last year of my time at the company, I was the only IT team member and solely responsible for the Infrastructure, despite still being in an apprenticeship. My duties and projects included: - Moving all workspaces and infrastructure to a new building, with minimal downtime - Introducing a Inventory - and Patch Management system, to ensure the over 100 workstations are kept up to date. - Phasing out old Windows ME / 2000 workstations in favor of more current operating systems - Assisting with the migration of all bare metal servers to a new VMWare ESX cluster - Setting up a second server room, to act as fallback for the most critical server infrastructure (Domain Controllers etc.) - Replacing Windows Server installations with Debian servers, where possible to save licensing cost. - Setting up a Nagios - based monitoring and alerting system for the server infrastructure already in place