My Expertise
Experience, Studies & Professional Past
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DevOps Engineering
I've found that DevOps is my favourite area of computing. It mixes part of all the technologies that I love the most. There's scripting in Python/Ruby/Perl/Bash to exercise my software engineering skills; Linux server administration and optimisation of services and infrastructure; security; networking and working closely with the development team.
It can be hard to define exactly what DevOps really is but one could term it a way of life more than anything. I've found the best DevOps Engineers are those that are highly interested and enthusiastic about new technology, that attend local meetups outside of work hours to find out what others in the field are doing and that have a strong passion for it!
Some of the technologies I've recently used:
- Configuration management (Ansible, Puppet, Chef, Salt)
- Development in segregated environments (dev/staging/production)
- AWS CloudFormation, CodeDeploy, CodePipeline
- Docker and LXC
- Jenkins
- Atlassian suite (JIRA, HipChat, Confluence, Bitbucket)
I would love to hear from you if you have an opening for a competent, experienced and enthusiastic DevOps Engineer.
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Amazon Web Services
Over several years I've assisted clients when it comes to the cloud.
Cloud services are growing rapidly, with more and more clients looking to get into the cloud, whether than be Microsoft's Azure, Google's Cloud, a self-hosted OwnCloud solution or most popular of all Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Being most familiar with AWS and it being the largest and fastest growing of the cloud services I usually suggest my clients go with it. I keep up to date with the latest changes, attending meetups here in Edinburgh and closely following the yearly Amazon re:Invent.
Specific experience I have with AWS includes:
- EC2 (instances/servers and scaling)
- RDS (databases, Postgres/MySQL)
- S3 (storage, including for a Docker registry)
- ECS (Docker)
- ELB / LC / ASG (load balancing)
- CloudFormation (infrastructure deployment)
- Route53 (domain name system)
As previously mentioned I also have significant experience in migrating clients' infrastructures to the cloud — be that a single server or a large infrastructure; experience in automation using Puppet and Cloud Formation; deployment of an S3 backed Docker registry and more…
Contact me if you have any enquiries!
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Linux System Administration
I've worked closely with Linux for well over a decade now, beginning to use it in my teenage years dual-booting it with Windows at first before using it for everything.
This lead me into the field of Linux sysadmin, starting with my own shared hosting, moving onto dedicated servers and eventually the cloud (once it became a thing). This has included working for all forms of clients from single users to small companies to $100m multinationals.
Commercially I have many years of experience which has required me to become familiar with hundreds of services, such as (briefly, this list is far from exhaustive…):
- HTTP servers (nginx, lighttpd, Apache, uwsgi)
- Caching servers (Varnish, nginx)
- Databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL, Oracle)
- Database tools (pgpool)
- Logging (ElasticSearch, Logrotate)
- Monitoring (Sensu, Kibana, Nagios)
- VPNs (OpenVPN)
- Virtualisation (Qemu/kvm, VirtualBox, vmware)
- Containerisation (Docker, LXC)
I've worked with all major distros in corporate environments including Debian and Ubuntu, RHEL and CentOS as well as the occasional client running Gentoo or Arch Linux (perhaps not best for production!).
See my CV for more detailed information.
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