Gordon Flood Email and Phone Number

Designed and led development and adoption of Automation of DevOps at BCBSNC since 2012, partnering with Cloud Architecture, Delivery and Cloud Ops to operationalize the BCBS Hybrid Cloud Strategy. My enthusiasm for the transformative power of these technologies keeps me awake at night thinking about our exciting next steps as we realize our future. It's not about the technologies in isolation, but about the transformation that can be realized when they are part of a systematic adoption strategy. The role I have played is to design, advocate for and execute centralized (automated) DevOps capabilities that make adoption easy, repeatable and yet not limiting in the way a centralized DevOps can be. My role has been about enabling the developer and the delivery team, but also (and as critically) about following through with the rest of the organization that the developer comes into contact with (release management, middleware, test management, analysts, project management, funding, etc) to help them understand the new capabilities and how they might redefine their jobs to support the delivery teams' new capabilities. This follow through is the real DevOps transformation, and my role in it has been as an educator and evangelist to ensure that the fire catches.I have led a team of dedicated DevOps engineers who have been pioneers in early adoption since 2012, before BlueCross' enterprise DevOps strategy took shape, introducing • Declarative Dependency Management (Maven, Nexus)• Static Code Analysis (Sonar, Jenkins)• Unit Testing and Coverage (JUnit, Jacoco) and • early Deployment Automation (IBM uDeploy) to BlueCross. Once the enterprise embraced a DevOps and Cloud Strategy, our team led in implementing • containerized pipelines for AWS and Openshift Cloud Deployment• Automating/Integrating Dependency Vulnerability Scanning (Sonatype IQ LifeCycle, Twistlock), and • Cloud Hosted Regression Testing (Openshift Zalenium Scalable Selenium grid as a service). In addition to DevOps and SecOps initiatives, we have had multiple DataOps initiatives including • automated provisioning of containerized lightweight ETL pipelines (Streamsets)• more heavy weight ETL pipelines (Ab Initio) and • Deep Learning pipelines leveraging AWS Spot Instances for Model Training. We have also integrated to our openshift pipeline • the automated creation of ISAM Junctions and • the automated creation of APIConnect Service Registry Products and Subscriptions.