Simon Thomson Email & Phone Number

Perth, Western Australia, Australia

Formalisation of the leadership role I was acting in. Leading a team of four talented DevOps Engineers. I am responsible for the interviewing and selection of my team members and am their direct manager. I promote open discussion of all problems and solutions amongst the team to get the best value from their talents and expereince. I consult widely with our customers to ensure our work is planned and prioritised effectively. I provide guidance on system architecture and direction to the team. I take responsibility for our output while ensuring that the team are credited for their implementations.

Perth, Western Australia, Australia

Continuing to support the growing Autonomy development teams. Standardising our environments, increasing efficency and providing self-service solutions to developers wherever possible. Leading a growing team of DevOps Engineers to meet the needs of two high velocity development efforts.

Australia

Support a startup like, fast paced development initiative. Develop CICD pipelines for two development teams working in different code management platforms. Migrate legacy, manually built environments to automated configuration and infrastructure deployments. Provide expertise as the SME for infrastructure design and automated deployment.

Department Of Education, Western Australia

• Continuing to contribute Puppet code for the management of Linux systems.• Mentoring a junior staff member tasked to assist me.• Maintaining and improving the Foreman system as the application owner.• Continuing to develop and improve code maintenance practices and git workflows.• Maintaining and improving an on premise Gitlab instance.• Led the team in developing and improving a CI-CD pipeline using Gitlab-CI.• Upgraded the Puppet infrastructure and configuration to handle the introduction of 4000 new hosts.• Led the final delivery of a Hashicorp Vault secrets management system developed by a departing staff member.• Continuing to develop and improve the Vault solution to add functionality and value.

Department Of Education, Western Australia

• Assessed various Systems Lifecycle Management tool sets to replace the end of life Satellite 5 system. Compiled the results into an options paper for the customer. The recommended option of Foreman was approved by the customer resulting in a significant per annum saving in licencing costs. • Produced a design document detailing the planned implementation of Foreman. This included automated Linux server deployments, Linux repository and patch management systems and configuration management via Puppet. • Customised the Foreman design to provide a Puppet configuration management and automation platform to all on site teams.• Implemented Foreman stage one, providing deployment, patch management and configuration management (via Puppet) for Linux servers. This system has cut the server deployment time from several hours to 15 minutes, resulted in configuration consistency across our Linux deployments and streamlined the implementation of new features, changes and fixes. • Provided documentation, training and early life cycle support for Foreman to the Linux management team.• Implemented Foreman stage two, providing an automation and configuration management platform to other teams. Assisted with their Foreman Organisation design and Puppet code.• Assessed our Git repository layout and code merging practices. Worked with other staff to improve our repository structure and development practices resulting in a lower barrier to entry for new staff and increased efficiency.

Department Of Education, Western Australia

• Continued to support Linux servers in the central data centre.• Implemented Active Directory integration for some Linux servers. This resulted in simplified access and user mangement for the teams using those servers.• Recognised and assisted with the resolution of firmware issues affecting all data centre hosts. This resolved long standing problems with accessing server remote management services.• Developed an improved process for Linux server patching resulting in a shorter patch cycle and enabling the work to be carried out by general operations staff.• Integrated with other teams on projects such as our Office 365 migration and F5 load balancer migration.• Designed and implemented our process to migrate customer web sites to new RHEL 7 Apache hosts.• Submitted issues found in Red Hat Resilient Storage software to Red Hat as bugs and worked with Red Hat to resolve these in updated software.

Department Of Education, Western Australia

• Assisted with the management of Linux servers in the Perth data centre.• Designed and implemented Red Hat Resilient Storage clusters in response to a customer request.• Improved and automated existing processes via custom bash scripts.

Department Of Education, Western Australia

• Supported Windows server and server applications at school sites across WA.• Resolved several long standing issues for customers.• Took on the Problem Manager role for the Desktops team.

W.A. Department Of Education

• Provided support for desktop operating system and application issues to customers at sites across WA.• Assisted with the Windows 7 to Windows 10 upgrade project.• Assumed the Problem Manager role for the Desktop team.

Perth, Australia

Provided a complete range of IT services to a small business with large and ongoing data needs. My duties encompassed their entire IT needs. Some specific tasks performed were:• Migrating their server infrastructure to VMware ESXi virtualisation.• Migrating Microsoft Small Business Server 2003 to 2008.• Providing a help desk to assist staff with IT issues.• Implementing an Infortrend Eonstor iSCSI storage system.• Maintenance, patching and backups of all systems.• Leveraged AWS to allow staff in three time zones to work on image processing tasks sequentially. The result was a 20 hour per day work window and the faster delivery of completed work to clients.• Interviewed and recommended suitable IT service providers to ensure the business was taken care of on my leaving.