gregwork.net

Greg Work

Contact

greg@gregwork.net

Summary

Unix Systems Engineer with extensive experience in a wide range of technologies, possessing excellent technical and personal communication skills and an eye for detail.

Strong advocate for DevOps methodologies, with a passion for automation and operations.

Extensive experience working in technical teams and interfacing with other departments to design, develop and successfully deploy internal and customer-facing projects.

Strong knowledge of standard UNIX tools and scripting.

Logical and collaborative troubleshooting and fault recovery methodology. Broad knowledge across many disciplines. Excellent diagnostic and research skills to find solutions for obscure issues.

Skills

  • Cloud infrastructure automation: AWS CloudFormation, AWS CDK, CFNDSL
  • Cloud application hosting-related services: AWS EC2, AWS ECS, AWS Elasticache, AWS Elasticsearch, AWS RDS/Aurora, AWS CloudFront
  • Cloud storage services: AWS S3, AWS EFS, AWS EBS
  • Cloud networking services: AWS VPC, AWS VPN
  • Cloud scalability/reliability services: AWS Load Balancers (ALB/NLB/ELB), AWS Autoscaling Groups
  • Cloud security services: AWS WAF, AWS Security Groups
  • Configuration management: Puppet, Ansible, Chef
  • Image Creation: Docker, Packer, Veewee
  • Development Environment Automation: Docker Compose, Vagrant
  • Deployment and Orchestration: Capistrano
  • Monitoring and Logging: Mon, rsyslog, Elasticsearch, Logstash, Fluent Bit
  • Instrumentation, Metrics and Visualisation: StatsD, Graphite, Grafana, collectd, Kibana, JMXTrans
  • Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment: Jenkins, Atlassian Bamboo, Bitbucket Pipelines
  • Packaging: Debian packaging created using native toolsets, FPM and git-buildpackage. RPM packaging using FPM, Docker
  • Programming languages: Primary languages: Ruby, Perl, Shell. Have developed/modified small tools in Typescript, Go. Have submitted patches in Java, Python
  • Hardware and Storage: x86 servers (Sun, Oracle, Dell), SAN (IBM XIV, Sun StorageTek 6540/FlexLine FLX380, Brocade Fabric switches), NAS (Sun Storage 7000 Series Unified Storage Devices), ZFS
  • Virtualisation: Cloud-based (AWS EC2), Datacentre-grade (VMware ESX/ESXi + vCenter Server), Workstation-grade (VMware Fusion, VirtualBox), Partitioning (VServers, LXC, Solaris Zones, BSD Jails, Docker)
  • Automated Provisioning: Netboot, Preseed, Kickstart
  • Unix variants: Ubuntu, Debian, RedHat, CentOS, FreeBSD, OS X, Solaris
  • Source code management and code review: Git, Subversion, Atlassian FishEye/Crucible, Gerrit, Bitbucket, Github
  • Web and Application servers: Apache, Nginx, Glassfish, Jetty, Tomcat, PHP-FPM
  • Database: PostgreSQL, MySQL
  • Networking and Network services: IOS, firewalls, routers, switches, VPN, DNS, DHCP, LDAP, NFS, PXE
  • Load balancers: Cisco ACE, F5 Big IP LTM, HAProxy

Professional Experience

Senior Systems Engineer - Aligent Consulting

Full time permanent from September 2017 to date

  • Designed and developed CDK-like CloudFormation scaffolding system based on CFNDSL; this defines defaults for many AWS services with minimal configuration required while still providing methods for use-specific overrides and extension.
  • Designed and implemented ECS/Docker-based Cloud hosting infrastructure for Aligent’s core products based on the CFNDSL scaffolding system, templated for rapid deployment, yet flexible for per-project overrides or extension.
  • Designed and implemented highly scalable/highly available hosting infrastructure for PWA/headless eCommerce environments, implemented in CDK, based on AWS S3 and CloudFront.
  • Designed and implemented Docker/Docker Compose-based development infrastructure, in some instances, cutting environment build times and developer onboarding from hours/days to minutes.
  • Augmented and integrated third-party Docker containers and services to improve developer efficiency, tooling or replicate third-party hosting infrastructure.
  • Customised and implemented Cloud hosting infrastructure based on custom AMIs, Chef, AWS EC2 and AWS CodeDeploy for Aligent’s core products.
  • Maintained legacy development infrastructure, based on VirtualBox, Vagrant and Chef.
  • Designed and integrated simulators or emulators for AWS services and infrastructure, allowing for almost exact replication of production AWS hosting environments in development environments (IAM role simulators, service simulators provided by integrating LocalStack or custom configurations of server software, such as HAProxy used to emulate AWS load balancing and CDN products).
  • Designed, planned and completed multiple successful Cloud migrations, increasing site performance and resiliency, while typically delivering cost savings on hosting infrastructure.
  • Designed and developed tooling for development and corporate IT.
  • Reviewed and improved deployment procedures, in some instances, reducing build times from hours to ~15 minutes.
  • Member of Aligent’s Confidentiality and Security Team, responsible for responding to security incidents, improving security posture and procedures, as well as reviewing and authorising day-to-day operational security requests.
  • Designed, implemented and managed Aligent’s corporate IT infrastructure (cloud and on-prem; routers, switches, firewalls, VPNs, phone systems, workstations, video conferencing hardware, hosting of internal/corporate services).
  • Designed and implemented procedures, infrastructure and services to allow the business to continue as normal through COVID-19.
  • Performed benchmarking and performance tuning of infrastructure and applications.
  • Participated on on-call roster for system and application support.
  • Interviewed and mentored system administration staff.

Senior Systems Engineer - Internode/iiNet/TPG

Full time permanent from April 2007 to September 2017

  • Successfully introduced and advocated for the adoption of DevOps practices, including assisting and mentoring developers on operational concerns and providing the infrastructure to support for high quality software releases.
  • Designed and developed Configuration Management infrastructure based on Puppet, currently managing 300 servers.
  • Designed and developed programatically generated, local development environments based on Packer and Vagrant.
  • Designed and developed a generic deployment toolkit based on Capistrano, used to deploy Perl, PHP and Java software, in either one-click or continuous deployment scenarios.
  • Designed and implemented Continuous Integration environments, including custom-written clean-room compilation environments.
  • Designed and implemented application instrumentation and metrics collection infrastructure, based on StatsD, Graphite and JMXTrans.
  • Designed and built infrastructure to deploy and support many instances of core billing platforms. Deployment tooling included configuration automation based on Puppet, custom-written deployment and environment management tooling, custom-written software to automate GlassFish, development environments based on Packer and Vagrant, and centralised logging/log data extraction based on Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana.
  • Member of several Special Interest Groups (Perl, Java, CI/CD) to further advocate DevOps practices and provide assistance and mentoring on operational concerns.
  • Designed, implemented and maintained virtualisation platforms, based on VMware ESXi.
  • Implemented and maintained SAN/NAS storage platforms.
  • Implemented and maintained load balancer platforms.
  • Designed, developed and provided full-stack managed hosting services and support for clients.
  • Responsible for System Operations presence in Internode’s datacentres, including resource management, capacity planning, hardware installs and network build/migrations.
  • Provided information, support, mentoring and training to other team members and departments.
  • Provided technical and client-facing documentation for systems and services.
  • Performed troubleshooting and fault diagnosis across all layers of the stack, from testing cross-datacentre fibre optics to debugging application failures via stack dumps.
  • Improved High Availability and Disaster Recovery for core applications by implementing configuration automation and retrofitting clustering and load balancing into production environments.
  • Performed benchmarking and performance tuning of infrastructure and applications.
  • Participated on on-call roster for system and application support.

Senior Corporate Support Officer - Internode

Full time permanent from September 2005 to April 2007

  • Performed support for Internode’s corporate clients and acted as an escalation point for other Corporate Support staff, helpdesk agents and Sales.
  • Performed second level support for Internode’s helpdesk.
  • Evaluated hardware for Internode to sell to its clients.
  • Performed custom Cisco configuration for clients, including building firewalls and site-to-site, inbound, star and mesh VPNs.
  • Provided network consultation services to clients.
  • Designed, built and administered department servers and Unix workstations for staff.

Infrastructure Analyst - EDS

Full time permanent from June 2003 to September 2005

  • Deployed, maintained and supported EDS’ next-generation business applications across multiple remote locations interstate and overseas.
  • Coordinated implementation of server and network builds in local and remote datacenters.
  • Coordinated application deployment across multiple support groups.
  • Utilised High Availability technologies, such as clustering, redundant firewalls and network links, replicated database configuration and load balancing content switches.
  • Performed 24x7 on-call support, troubleshooting, fault diagnosis and restoration for mission-critical business applications and managed hosting clients.
  • Developed Disaster Recovery plans and led implementation testing.
  • Created and maintained application information and configuration information.
  • Provided Managed Web Hosting services to internal and external clients.
  • Developed custom solutions for client developed applications and web sites, according to best practices, client requirements and corporate standards.
  • Built, installed and maintained servers in various environments, both on-site and remote.
  • Maintained servers in secure DMZ and client environments.
  • Installed, configured and supported open source technologies in a production environment (Squid, Apache, Tomcat, MySQL, Cygwin).
  • Provided consultation and engineering services to clients.
  • Planned and performed a NT4 to Windows 2000/2003 migration.
  • Created and maintained server information and configuration documentation.

Help Desk Coordinator - EDS

Full time permanent from November 2000 to June 2003

  • Supported many different clients, environments and technologies from ATMs and bank specific hardware, software and networks (including EFTPOS networks), through to desktop, server and custom application support.
  • Transitioned helpdesk operations to new support centres.
  • Liaised with client management groups to instigate new, streamlined support procedures.
  • Created documentation and procedures for the corporate knowledgebase.
  • Trained new and existing staff in EDS and client specific procedures.