I joined a team who were building on premise offering of an existing product for a government end client. I created a backlog and bought order to the delivery of the product, following basic agile principles.At its core this involved packaging up the whole system with Helm and Zarf so that this could be deployed to customer Kubernetes platforms using FluxCD. Whilst doing this, I implemented CI/CD automation, security scanning, documentation and automating installation steps of the system as well as end to end testing of the install.This involves working across both GCP & AWS and operating in highly regulated government Air-gapped environments.Technologies: GCP, AWS, Kubernetes, Zarf, ArgoCD, FluxCD, Terraform, Helm, Tekton, Python and Golang.

Worked on the Brightsign Cloud offering that managed hundreds of thousands of connected digital signage players worldwide.I lead a team that migrated a large estate created in Ansible in AWS to new AWS accounts created using control tower and terraform under automation, whilst adhering to AWS well architected best practices. In parallel we built out a self-service Kubernetes platform following GitOps principals running production workloads, supplying patterns for CI/CD, Deployments, and observability so that other teams can migrate there services themselves.Key achievements:- Moved to a Zero Trust model by moving internal tooling from behind a VPN to Cloudflare Zero Trust- Championed the Docs as code philosophy by deploying internal technology documentation to a website using Hugo + Cloudflare pages behind an SSO login- Built out a comprehensive observability strategy using the grafana Loki, Tempo, Grafana and Mimir stack- Introduced incident.io to managed and track incidents- Built out reusable GitHub actions workflows and actions to compose CD pipelines across services and system components- Structured and designed a terraform setup spanning 18 accounts all under automation in Github actions- Built out a simple GitOps pipeline to deploy changes to Kubernetes clusters with GitHub actions publishing OCI artifacts and FluxCD enforcing state in the clusters- Built a team and worked together to build a roadmap, refine stories, and plan and undertake sprints

I lead SRE efforts on a project building a bioinformatics pipeline to analyse thousands of covid samples daily for the UK Health Security Authority. The system was written in Python and consisted of several services running on Kubernetes. I spent most of my time implementing or improving monitoring and observability of the system. This involved using Datadog to implement robust and thorough tracing, logging and metrics to instrument the services. I then spent time with the team defining and impliemnting SLI, SLO, and SLAs of the system, and then created the relevant dashboards and alerts. Additionally I worked on load testing the system using the aforementioned SLOs, whilst also performing chaos testing methodologies and hardening the system against different scaling and failure scenarios.

I was working on a global payments platform across multiple AWS regions and Kubernetes clusters.Implemented a deployment pipeline with GitOps principles with Flux2 & Helm.Improved service and platform scalability greatly using tools such as K6.io and creating SLOs to which our load test results conform to.Improved the terraform infrastructure as code deployment using Spacelift.Designed, implemented and deployed Istio as an ingress gateway and service mesh across our Kubernetes estate to solve scalability and reliability issues.Worked towards using tools such as cortex.io to implement service scorecards, measure DORA metrics and improve development standards.Alongside this, I have worked with a small platform team to build a backlog, and move towards working in sprints to improve the core platform infrastructure.Technologies: AWS, Terraform, Kubernetes, Helm, Istio, Envoy, Datadog, Golang, Flux2, Spacelift, GitHub Actions, Cortex.io.

I worked on a large system running in Kubernetes with 60 services with over 100 deployments in production. I was hired to create a new platform in atop of AWS EKS and migrate off a tectonic 1.8 k8s cluster.I initially built out a platform consisting of; EKS managed via terraform, platform components deployed via helm, and all of this in a continuous delivery pipeline using concourse CI.I built patterns and standards for CI/CD, Docker images, Kubernetes resources via Helm charts and Terraform projects to be reused by product teams.I embedded myself in different product teams to build new, and improve existing systems. Whilst doing this I worked closely with developers to spread knowledge of the new platform, tooling,how to contribute, and patterns so that they could self serve and migrate services over to the new platform and assisted in doing so.I finished my contract upon the successful completion of the migration.Technologies: AWS, Terraform, Kubernetes, Helm, Concourse CI, Prometheus, Thanos, Grafana, Docker, Kibana, Fluentd, Elasticsearch, VPA, HPA, Cluster Autoscaler, ALB ingress, OPA Gatekeeper, Snowflake, Gitops, Traefik, Skipper.

I was bought into Qudini to migrate their AWS infrastructure to terraform, help build new services and build a production ready Kubernetes platform to host new and existing services and tooling.Initially I migrated a dozen production environments for high profile clients in 4 AWS regions into infrastructure managed by terraform. There environments were either hand created, or partially created with terraform. I either performed a migration to new environments with acceptable service disruption or imported hundreds of resources into multiple terraform states. Whilst undertaking this I followed best practices around terraform project structure, module testing, linting, and put all of this into a CD pipeline. Additionally in parallel I built multiple Kubernetes clusters using EKS and Terraform, deploying tooling such as prometheus operator, grafana, sobarqube, elasticsearch curator, ingresses, kube2iam, kubedb etc via helm using helmfile in CD pipelines.Along side this I worked in product teams sprints to work with them to build new services and deploy them to production. Whilst doing this I helped create standards for metrics & monitoring (Prometheus, Grafana), structured logging (EFK), and facilitate the creation and execution of steps on go live checklists. Whilst working within product teams I constantly evangelised DevOps and SRE principles and techniques. Finally I spent a considerable amount of time guiding general application architecture, driving implementation of Continuous Delivery, promoting feature flagging and debugging performance and reliability issues.Key technologies: AWS, Terraform, Kubernetes, Prometheus, Prometheus Operator, Alertmanager, Grafana, Helm, Filebeat, Kube2Iam, Bitbucket Pipelines, Concourse CI, Docker, Elasticsearch, MySql, Memcached, Traefik.

Whilst at Flyt I built a simple Kubernetes based platform to operate and deploy production software upon. I have built and managed Kubernetes clusters using a combination of Terraform & kops in CD pipelines using Concourse CI, releasing tooling (Prometheus, Grafana, Kibana, Heptio Authenticator etc) and services using helm charts. My aim was to make sure everything was in code, deployed through CD, whilst being robust and simple to operate.Alongside this, I worked within teams to help them build, design, own and operate their own services, and migrate existing services. This consisted of being involved with the architecture, build and go live of services, and guiding the definition of logging and metrics formats, exposing and educating teams to new tooling and practices. Additionally, also helping teams define on call schedules within their teams, key metrics to measure and alert on and ultimately them owning their services day to day operations.Technologies: AWS, Terraform, Kubernetes, Helm, Concourse CI, Prometheus, Grafana, Docker, Heptio Authenticator, Kibana, Filebeat, Elasticsearch.

Whilst at River Island I introduced infrastructure as code and continuous delivery to multiple product teams, and worked closely with them to show them how to build and operate their own infrastructure. I was then part of a small team that looked after shared services and tooling, and continually advised and supported product teams. I was also responsible for hiring other platform engineers, and involved in the developer hiring processes. Due to the differing requirements, and skill sets in teams, both ECS and Kubernetes was used along with suitable monitoring solutions. Technologies: Terraform, Kubernetes, Helm, ECS, Concourse CI, Hashicorp Vault, Prometheus, Grafana, Docker, AWS

Whilst at Boston Consulting Group Digital Ventures I worked with teams to build systems and infrastructure for new startups.This involved building continuous deployment pipelines (Concourse CI), immutable infrastructure (Packer + Chef), deploying container orchestration frameworks (ECS & Kubernetes) and making this all reproducible using tools that facilitate infrastructure as code (Terraform).Whilst building these platforms, processes and tools I was working closely with developers to transfer knowledge to enable them to edit and operate infrastructure. I implemented and encouraged people to contribute to playbooks, infrastructure testing, RFC processes and other best practices.

Leading web operations efforts within a small team creating the new Sainsbury's Groceries Online web platform. The Sainsbury's Groceries Online platform processes over £1 billion per year, therefore needs to be continuously available, and change rapidly. I am involved in building and launching the platform and defining processes and practices to run a Golang Micro SOA with a Isomorphic Javascript frontend in AWS.I have Created continuous delivery pipelines with chef + consul to build, test, release and deploy docker containers in Amazon Container Service. Additionally I created a workflow that enabled a developer to create a new service and deploy it to production in under 5 minutes.These services then are automatically monitored by consul + sensu and log to an ELK stack.Whilst doing this I have been building reusable components, in the form of terraform modules, and chef custom resource cookbooks that are being reused in multiple other projects within Sainsbury's.Additionally I proposed, implemented and run an RFC process across the engineering organisation focusing on people being able to propose new standards, practices, and procedures.

*** CrowdSurge and Songkick merged ***Myself and my team followed DevOps ideologies working closely with software engineers to create standards and best practices to ship software quickly and effectively. We managed software platforms in a data center and AWS, using appropriate toolsets, believing strongly in infrastructure as code.Managed the operation of the songkick.com website, app, and many backend systems, as well as a ticketing platform selling millions of tickets a year.Whilst Head of Technical operations I planned, architected and prepared systems for high volume ticket on sales such as the Adele world wide tour. Selling tickets for Adele involved selling hundreds of thousands of tickets in hours, and doing tens of thousands of requests a second across several systems.

Creating highly scalable infrastructure & systems to support an e-commerce system that handles spikes of hundreds of thousands of users. Hired several members of the Engineering team, and was involved in architecting, and building a golang microservice SOA, and the underlying infrastructure platform it operated on.Introducing teams to new tooling, technology and processes to improve development, architecture and scalability of the platform. Utilising chef, cloudformation, logstash, sensu, graphite + more on top of AWS to support a microservice architecture that consists of technologies such as AngularJS, GoLang, PHP, Cassandra, MongoDB, MySQL, Redis, Elasticsearch, etcd, and more.

I single handedly Planned, Designed and implemented hugely scalable, automated infrastructure as code in AWS.Serving over 1million users, and 250k+ daily active users, 20K CCU with ease.Heavily utilising Opscode Chef, creating reproducible infrastructure as code. Following cookbook library + wrapper practices, using tools such as foodcritic, spork and berkshelf to help me do so.Used cloud formation to automate the build, repair and provision all infrastructure, extensively.Created an orchestration platform in python, using fabric, pychef and flask to orchestrate software builds and deployments and server provisioning. Enabling continuous deployment + delivery, and fast and easy server provisioning. Deploying client + server code on every commit, automagically.Used tools such as logstash, graphite, and sensu, in a scalable highly available manner, to analyse, graph and alert on any eventuality.Created a logstash setup, processing and storing over 300Million logs a day in Elasticsearch.Releasing software to live servers without any downtime.

Helped implement new servers/services and maintain 280+ FreeBSD/Linux servers, for clients such as HTC, Blockbuster and Samsung. Along side this, I planned, designed, purchased and rolled out dozens of servers in colocation space in the US. I was also involved in planning, designing and implementing LAN/WAN network infrastructure globally. I also administered several windows active directory, exchange, and file servers.

I was contracted by Broadcast Networks to work on Big Brother 10, due to my previous experience and knowledge of the production systems and infrastructure in place. I supported the systems and infrastructure in place at Big Brother 10 at Elstree Studios.

I worked for a wide range of large media companies, working on many high profile TV shows. My roles varied greatly from day to day, and lead me to get excellent exposure to many technologies, businesses, and situations. In this role I was involved in; designing, configuring, and installing infrastructure and systems, both in offices and in outside broadcast locations.It was an often challenging and demanding, but provided me with more excellent exposure to IT in Business.

I worked on a IT helpdesk supporting a wide variety of systems, including a wide range of legacy systems and networking protocols. This provided me with a solid foundation in computing.

I worked supporting workstations, and servers, gaining a broad understanding of networked machines, networking and active directory.