Profile
An eager, self-motivated and multi-disciplined individual; the majority of my professional experience has been providing Operational and infrastructure support, but with a focus on cloud technologies and automation. I strive to work smarter.
My engineering work focuses on configuration and infrastructure management for SAP workloads hosted on premise and in Microsoft Azure. The focus of this is to provide reusability, repeatability, and automation. This is delivered as “Infrastructure as Code” (IaC) practices with Configuration management tools such as Ansible, ARM Templates and Terraform.
The basis of this knowledge and experiences comes from working as a Technical Support Analyst within an Operations team. Day-to-day I provided support for customers predominantly on SAP HANA appliances which run Enterprise Linux distributions (SUSE, Red Hat). This role required a broad understanding of data center, network, and cloud infrastructure as well as GNU/Linux, Pacemaker clustering and SAP HANA operations.
In my previous role as a DevOps Engineer, my primary epic was to migrate customer product code tracking APIs from Rackspace to AWS and to reduce the cost and required SME knowlege through automation. Goals included improving monitoring by implementing Nagios integrated into the output of deployment tools, creating a new framework configuration migrating from CFEngine3 to SaltStack and develop tools for automating deployment of projects into AWS based on the existing tools/features built for Rackspace Cloud.
During the course of my university education in architecture I made use of verbal and visual communication techniques to varying audiences in both individual and team work situations. I strive towards a satisfied completion of projects but take time to learn and reflect upon the processes undertaken.
Professional Experience
| Dec 2020 - Present | Centiq: Infrastructure Automation Engineer Creating 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 is 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. |
| Feb 2017 - Dec 2020 | Centiq: Technical Support Engineer (Operations and Engineering) Provide Operational and Infrastructure support for SAP HANA Appliances. Aid 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). |
| Sept 2016 - Feb 2017 | Hive Online: DevOps Engineer Provide support and write 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). Manage and monitor CentOS Linux servers running django applications on nginx/uWSGI, with MySQL Database, Redis and RabbitMQ clusters. Migrate older client environments and servers from dedicated and cloud based Rackspace services into AWS deployed infrastructure. |
| Apr 2015 - Sept 2016 | Adaptive Web: Linux Infrastructure Administrator Design, provision, maintain and support Amazon Web Service Infrastructures for clients. Configure 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. |
| Nov 2014 - Apr 2015 | Fast React Systems: Project and Implementation Support Create bespoke reports and program interfaces within FastReact software for customers in SQL. Write 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. |
| Apr 2014 - Nov 2014 | Fast React Systems: Technical Support Analyst Provide technical assistance, report bugs to the develpment team, assist QA team with bug testing/features. Produce video tutorials documenting new features in Fast React products. Build, administrate and maintain company Knowledgebase/Wiki on a Debian Linux server. Developer of the ePR2 licensing system (PHP, MySQL on Linux). |
| Feb 2013 - Apr 2014 | Griffin Information Systems: 1st Line Technical Support Diagnose and identify DSL and Linux Web Hosting faults, initiate resolution process. Provide technical advise on faults. Fire warden responsibility. |
| Jul 2007 - Sep 2007 | FPCR Environment and Design: General Assistant Summer work experience between first and second year of undergraduate degree. Involved in CAD drawing, SketchUp modelling and general office responsibilities of filing and archiving. |
Education
| 2011 - 2012 | M.Arch Architecture (Accellerated) Leicester School of Architecture |
| 2010 - 2011 | MA Architectural Design Leicester School of Architecture |
| 2006 - 2009 | BA (Hons) Architecture Leicester School of Architecture |
Certifications
| Dec 2019 | Microsoft Certified Azure for SAP Workloads Speciality |
| Nov 2019 | Microsoft Certified Azure Solutions Architect Expert |
| Apr 2015 | AWS Technical Professional Accreditation |
| Aug 2014 | edX Honor Code Certificate for Introduction to Linux |
Skills
- Linux
- DevOps
- AWS
- Azure
- Ansible
- Molecule
- Terraform
- Kubernetes
- Vagrant
- Shell scripting
- Python
- Go
- Git
- nginx
- Apache2
- Prometheus
Extra Curricular
- Maintainer of the most popular K3S (lightweight Kubernetes) role on Ansible Galaxy (xanmanning.k3s)
- Black belt in Go-Kan-Ryu Karate.
- Novice runner.
- Clean full UK driving license.