Nic Cope Email & Phone Number

Remote, Global, Us

I'm responsible for all things Crossplane.

Remote, Global, Us

Engineering lead for Crossplane. Crossplane is an open source CNCF project that lets you build your own control plane without writing code. Platform and SRE teams use Crossplane to provide a self-service cloud platform to the engineers they support.

Distributed, Us

San Francisco, California, Us

Technical lead for the multi-cluster Kubernetes architecture that powers Planet's analytics and product offerings on GCP. My fully remote team and I contributed upstream to Terraform, linkerd, the cluster autoscaler, and Kubernetes proper as well as open sourcing several smaller Kubernetes focused projects.In my spare time I lead Planet's 'DeRP' grass-roots disaster recovery planning program, and advocate for infrastructure best practices such as design documents, 'gitops', and lightweight agile processes.

Bellevue, Washington, Us

At OfferUp I worked with a small team to design and build a deployment and orchestration platform around Kubernetes to help move from a monolithic to a service architecture. I had a hand in everything from designing the build and deployment processes, to handling cluster turnup and management, and onboarding engineering teams. I also wrote surrounding tooling, primarily in Go.In my spare time I helped the team transition from an "operations" to an "SRE" way of working, chiefly by advocating infrastructure as code, operational responsibility for engineering teams, and working smarter through lightweight Agile software engineering processes.

Stockholm, Stockholm County, Se

The sole SRE on Spotify's software deployment team. I switched teams to try my hand at Java development, and to experiment with a more distributed SRE presence at Spotify.I primarily worked on maintaining and extending Helios, Spotify's container orchestration framework. Spotify uses Helios to deploy to several thousand backends. Most significantly I built a framework for programmatically spinning up lightweight Helios instances to ease Docker based integration testing, and improved the resilience of Helios's 'rolling update' deployment strategy. I've also migrated monitoring from a costly external service to Spotify's internal platform. During my tenure I helped the team design and build an opinionated abstraction layer to decouple deployments from Helios and provide a simpler interface to developers, heavily leveraging the Google Cloud Platform. My main focus has been designing and implementing a Pubsub based notification system.I continued to advocate for reliability at Spotify, primarily by spearheading a program to introduce lightweight disaster recovery exercises throughout the organisation. I also managed a fruitful collaboration between the compute capacity and deployment teams to better integrate our systems.

Stockholm, Stockholm County, Se

I lead various efforts to streamline the management of Spotify's constantly growing fleet of over 15,000 machines.As an advocate of automation through code I helped build an SRE team that automated the entire lifecycle of Spotify's bare metal fleet. This work freed at least five full time engineers from repetitive and unreliable semi-automated work, provided a simple self-service portal for requesting and managing bare metal compute capacity, and reduced the turnaround time for new capacity from weeks to minutes.I designed and lead the development of the automatic machine discovery and intake framework, an interim provisioning system to free up time for development (provcannon), the provisioning job broker (Neep), and the machine lifecycle management backend (Sid). I also maintained and extended the inventory service (ServerDB). Toward the end of my tenure in the compute capacity team I provided design guidance for and contributed to the next generation capacity management service (SPM). See the attached article for further details.During this time I served as a source of advice and training amongst the SRE organisation, particularly in relation to on-call, hiring, peer reviewed design, Python development, testing, and code review. I also contributed heavily to the steering group that successfully transitioned Spotify's "SREs on-call for everything" rotation into a cross-discipline incident management team.

Mountain View, Ca, Us

At Google I focused on internal AAA systems serving tens of thousands of users. While I carried a pager for various parts of Google's internal infrastructure including LDAP, Kerberos and load balancing, most of my time in SRE was spent as technical lead for our RADIUS infrastructure.I worked extensively with FreeRADIUS, though I particularly enjoyed writing Python to solve complex systems problems. This involved developing, packaging and deploying tools to automate my job. For example, massaging data from various sources to whitelist 802.1x users or implementing a daemon to export whitebox monitoring variables.After moving away from FreeRADIUS (for my own sanity) I did some hacking on a Django based mailing list manager, and managed the process of turning down a pervasive, yet redundant internal system intelligently and cleanly with zero user impact.Towards the end of my tenure at Google I worked on automating the deployment of a custom BGP/VRRP based load balancer solution to ~200 offices around the world using a custom Python framework. I also contributed a small handful of features to the project's Go codebase.

Mountain View, Ca, Us

As an I.T. Field Technician at Google I looked after anything required to make Google employees more productive through the use of technology. As a Field Tech in a remote office my job was as much I.T. management as it was highly technical support.This involved everything from final level support of Linux and Mac systems, to managing office build outs, to installing and maintaining embedded Linux out of band management for large server rooms, to dealing with technology suppliers.

Balcatta, Western Australia, Au

I designed and performed planned and creative functionality and vulnerability testing on various aspects of Secure Systems' SDV security products. I became somewhat of an all-rounder in that I also supported clients, gave input on security and usability considerations and acted as Secure Systems’ network administrator on a daily basis. I also undertook technical odd jobs, for example profiling the technology of a potential partner via interview with their technical team or working with a major UNIX vendor to match our technologies through a novel solution.