Drew Raines Email & Phone Number

Nashville, Tn, Us

Redwood City, California, Us

As Equinix refines its digital portfolio, I took the opportunity to step back and focus on a part of the business that needs specific attention. We have mission critical services that need to evolve to serve customers, and I want it to go faster. Through my tenure, while trying to build new things, we've seen places where we could enforce standard, composable software interfaces that would enable our broad ecosystem of partners and customers to build what they need to build to expose the differentiated value of Equinix's vast footprint.

Redwood City, California, Us

Equinix is the neutral Internet partner and the largest provider of digital infrastructure in the world. We connect 10k enterprises through 3k networks in our 250+ data centers in 70 markets around the world. 70-80% of the Internet's traffic travels through our buildings. In fact, in April 2023 we passed a significant milestone of 30 Tbps of peak traffic across our global footprint.As I was winding down my time at Elastic, I was going to take an indefinite hiatus. Around that time, Zac Smith reached out about an opportunity that perfectly suited me: build the team behind the world's open platform for hybrid, multi-cloud network, compute, and storage inside the heart of the Internet. We work closely with our core networking partners to provide scalable edge infrastructure.

Redwood City, California, Us

Provided executive leadership during critical transition, managing $160MM Edge Infrastructure portfolio (Equinix Metal, Cloud Adjacent Storage, Network Edge) and 300+ product managers, engineers, and program managers. Collaborated cross-functionally with Sales, Marketing, Ops, Support, and Finance to develop annual plans and refine our digital strategy.

San Francisco, California, Us

To align on our focus as company committed to our customers' needs, we consolidated our two primary infrastructure organizations under unified leadership. I still functioned as a director, but with a broader influence over all of Elastic's compute, storage, networking, and Kubernetes platforms. I orchestrated a re-org across 30- and 50-person teams to complete the transition.My focus was largely around setting up our cloud platform organization for scale. During this period I led the team through several stabilization efforts. We achieved fully managed compute across our tens of thousands of VMs and greatly increased automation of our 60+ regions across all major public cloud providers around the globe.

San Francisco, California, Us

The years of biggest growth. I was responsible for SaaS behind our on-prem success and in the critical path of our $500M+ revenue. I was closely involved in growing our engineering organization from 5 to 1,000, onboarding 10 acquisitions, bringing our company through IPO, while leading an organization of 20+ developers and managers across four continents.We managed distribution of our product line (Elasticsearch, ML, Kibana, Logstash, Beats, etc.). We ushered in containerization. We delivered the first Kubernetes-based generalized computing platform to Elastic developers, which grew to 1,000 applications across dozens of clusters. We built and maintained several other customer-critical applications (eg geoip db, maps service, enterprise licensing) with several nines of uptime using minimal staff.

San Francisco, California, Us

While we were stabilizing and scaling the Sonian search infrastructure (see below), the Elasticsearch community was exploding. We were contributing both code and advice. We also supported Shay (its creator) financially, which eventually helped him bootstrap a company with three other open-source giants (Simon Willnauer, Uri Boness, Steven Schuurman). They were about to close a series A, and were looking to hire some engineers. I couldn't say no to the opportunity.I wore all the early stage engineering hats: software engineer, sales engineer, support engineer, even education engineer. Perhaps my most notable achievement early on was bringing in the tooling I had developed to managed extremely large Elasticsearch clusters which would become the beloved _cat API. I had also built up several pieces of infrastructure which laid the cornerstones of engineering.

Waltham, Massachusetts, Us

Sonian (now part of Barracuda) was an early AWS-based, Amazon-backed, e-discovery startup. Actually AWS was the only cloud back then. EC2 was even pretty new. I joined a backend team that built the collection and search infrastructure. Tim Dysinger, then CTO, recognized the competitive advantage Clojure was turning into, so he started hiring developers in the community. I was honored to be counted among Phil Hagelberg, Steve Gilardi, Kevin Downey, Paul Stadig, Dan Larkin, and many others who joined after me.At that time we had near a petabyte of data, and the search infrastructure wasn't scaling. We were working on some custom Solr-based code at the time when a new project called Elasticsearch came out. It turned us off at first as too new, but then I met with Shay Banon and was sold. This wasn't just an idle side-project. He would be there for us.I volunteered to specialize in the search buildout and migration, working closely with Shay and our new hire from the Boston search scene, Igor Motov. Over the next two years we built the largest Elasticsearch deployment at the time, with billions of documents under management. These weren't tiny log files either. E-discovery involves interesting challenges beyond log enrichment, including large legal attachments in the hundreds of mb. We made it all work, even on old first-gen magnetic EBS!

Us

NotifyMD was an innovative company in healthcare that grew out of an answering service appliance. When I joined they had pivoted to call centers staffed with amazing folks that would be the first line of communications for patients.My role, from HQ, supported the SaaS operations within these call centers, providing data to decision makers. My main achievement was implementing an initially slow Python-based report aggregation tool in Clojure, a brand new lisp dialect that I tried one day after the author posted to Lambda the Ultimate. I was hooked after, without even a standard build system or library, I was able to completely rewrite the codebase into a concurrent, functional masterpiece (it wasn't that pretty) within a few days.

An early Facebook app that turned viral and had a crazy amount of traffic. Was a fun scaling challenge for a few months that led to an acquisition by RockYou.Thank you Wade Roberts for the opportunity!

Cabedge was a premiere web marketing company. Their designs were some of the best in the industry. Working with folks like Matt Reed, Blake Allen, Seth Buntin, Lemmie Stone, Chris Blanz, was a treat to say the least.I did the usual web stuff. Wrote shopping carts, sliced & diced PSDs into CSS/HTML, JavaScript, Rails, Django. Also managed various elements of operations. I learned a lot about agency work and how to listen to customers. We also had the coolest office back when people had offices.

Nashville, Tennessee, Us

Moved over to the central university IT dept to work on larger scale and build on my newfound love of administering internet email. We had a 60,000-account sendmail deployment into which I got to integrate ProofPoint spam filtering.Worked with incredible folks like Eric Hall, Denny Burk, Jason Gilbreath, Eddie Sananikone, and Dan Nanto (who I hope will forgive me for complaining so much about Java).

Nashville, Tennessee, Us

The wee hours of settling with the fact that I wouldn't pursue a music career. I had experience with Unix from working in the computing center at Virginia Tech, which was my favorite part. My wife was working in Vanderbilt Medical Center. Not as a doctor. As a barista. That's right, she was a storied employee for the local, campus-wide Suzie's Espresso empire. She had made friends with faculty and staff alike, knowing their coffee preferences by heart. One of her customers was an amazing guy named Charles Alexander, a bioinformaticist in the Program for Human Genetics. Somehow they talked about me wanting a computer job and Charles told her they were looking for a unix systems administrator. I wasn't qualified to run a big E450 and several workstations, but I interviewed anyway.Tom Caldwell was one of my interviewers. A unix veteran, he gave me a test. He had a printout of an AMANDA backup report sitting on his desk. It was a tar one-liner piped through a few different other things (it was a real tape backup). Thankfully I had so much linux command line experience that I was able to fumble through it. I was honest about the parts I didn't know. Tom smiled with approval.Thus started the dream job for a computer hobbyist. Hundreds of thousands of dollars of high-end Sun equipment at my disposal to figure out. Fortunately I had taken over for a guy that had a lot more experience. He had it pretty well organized and left good comments in the config files. Infra as code wasn't a thing back then. But some of it was RCS'd.Since I didn't have a university degree, and not really any experience, they didn't pay much. But the experience was worth more than any degree. I made the most of every minute. I managed a lab environment of a dozen Solaris workstations, designed and administered SMTP/IMAP (qmail+Courier), learned and deployed DNS (djbdns), built 20-node Linux computing cluster for MPI parallel processing (when it was still cutting-edge!), bought new hardware. <3