Xan Manning

FinTech. Responsible for building and maintaining the platform infrastructure built in Google Cloud Platform and providing tooling for deployments to the platform. Koodoo's digital mortgage platform ran in Kubernetes (GKE), and made use of other GCP provided services such as CloudSQL, Google Cloud Storage, Pub/Sub. Whilst working for Koodoo I was responsible for implementing Hashicorp Vault in Kubernetes, integrating it with deployments and providing new services such as Transit Secrets (aka "Encryption-as-a-Service"). I also standardised the numerous Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) and Configuration Management repositories to provide better consistency, and a familiar interface across the multiple technologies (such as Terraform, Helm, Ansible) with a "./go" script. Standardisation of our IaC repositories led to easier migration from deployments with CircleCI to GitHub Actions. Alongside this, I undertook a project to take manually configured monitoring configuration in GCP, Checkly and Prometheus, and capture it in Terraform code to reap the benefits of IaC.

Created automation and tooling as part of an automation platform to aid in the delivery and on-going support of customer systems running SAP workloads on-premise and in the cloud (Azure). The goal of this was to provide reliable and predictable outcomes as well as reduce the effort required to build and support systems by increasing repeatability and reducing the number of "snowflake" (and fragile) configurations. Additional side-project undertaken to migrate a legacy component of Centiq's in-house monitoring system "Monitiq" into Azure running on Kubernetes (AKS).

Provided Operational and Infrastructure support for SAP HANA Appliances. Aided in the delivery of engineering projects, working and providing expertise for automation and auditing in Ansible, Cucumber/Aruba; primarily focusing on cloud based projects in Azure (and some AWS). Built and maintained a Prometheus deployment for internal monitoring of resources (VMs, Network appliances, VPNs, etc.).

Provided support and wrote automation for client cloud environments running in Rackspace Cloud and Amazon Web Services. Configuration Management with SaltStack and CFEngine3, automation with Python and AWS API (boto). Managed and monitored CentOS Linux servers running Django applications on nginx/uWSGI, with MySQL Database, Redis and RabbitMQ clusters. Migrated older client environments and servers from dedicated and cloud based Rackspace services into AWS deployed infrastructure.

Designed, provisioned, maintained and supported Amazon Web Services Infrastructures for clients. Configured Linux web servers for running bespoke Drupal applications using Apache/NGINX with PHP5/HHVM on AWS EC2 instances. Introduced GitLab for version control and implemented a CI/CD pipeline for application deployment.

Created bespoke reports and program interfaces within FastReact software for customers in SQL. Wrote reports in FastReport, SSRS and Fast React's Web Dashboard. Developer of the Web Dashboard project, written in C#/ASP.NET/SQL. Lead Developer of the ePR2 licensing system written in PHP/MySQL. LEMP server administrator for the Support Wiki and ePR2 licensing system. Maintainer of the Web Dashboard and ePR2 Git repositories.

Provided technical assistance, reported bugs to the development team, assisted QA team with bug testing/features. Produced video tutorials documenting new features in Fast React products. Built, administered and maintained company Knowledgebase/Wiki on a Debian Linux server. Developer of the ePR2 licensing system (PHP, MySQL on Linux).

Diagnosed and identified DSL and Linux Web Hosting faults, initiated resolution process. Provided technical advice on faults. Fire warden responsibility.

The most downloaded Ansible Role for installing and managing K3s (Lightweight Kubernetes) Clusters with over 1.4 million downloads.