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David H.

Senior devops engineer, london based

Works remotely from London

  • 51.509648
  • -0.099076
  • Suggested rate € 650 / day
  • Experience 7+ years
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Location and workplace preferences

Location
London, England, United Kingdom
Remote only
Primarily works remotely

Preferences

Project length
Between 1-3 months

Verifications

Freelancer code of conduct signed
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Verified email

Languages

  • English

    Native or bilingual

Categories

Skills (21)

David in a few words

I am a driven and passionate Senior DevOps Engineer. Originally coming from a Software development background some 15 years ago and now with over 8+ years of experience in commercial DevOps roles.

I generally love all things cloud & automation.

Of late I've obtained a particularly in-depth knowledge of AWS, Terraform, Github actions, Atlantis, Kubernetes, Helm, Ansible, Linux, Networking, Python, and systems design.

I specialise in helping small early stage startups cutting through the noise and getting setup with AWS environments that have good foundations for growth and security.

Experience

Unmind

Principal Devops Engineer

London, UK

October 2020 - Today (2 years and 5 months)

Leading infrastructure platform at Unmind. AWS Terraform Terragrunt Atlantis Kubernetes (EKS) Helm ArgoCD Cloudformation Python GitHub actions Container led environments Serverless Observability (datadog, statsd, graphite) Micro-service design

Personal projects

Project Lead Developer

London, UK

May 2020 - Today (2 years and 10 months)

Broke apart a monolith and converted stack to Kubernetes on GCP.
- Helm for Kubernetes deployments, orchestrated by Circleci for continuous, seamless deployments without disruption or downtime within the app.
- Extremely important in gaming and allows me to deploy hundreds of times p/ d.
- GCP infrastructure/environments built with Terraform.
- Re-developed the monolith into ansible playbooks containers using a mixture of packer+ansible & straight Dockerfiles.
- I have implemented log shipping + host monitoring to Datadog using Fluentbit.
- Implemented GCP Cloud Armour to help detect and prevent malicious attacks and developed and refined the codebase to refine and expand features. This redevelopment agenda is live and can be found here (CAUTION NSFW) https://www.street-crime.com.

BGC Partners

Senior Devops Engineer (Contract)

London, UK

October 2018 - May 2020 (1 year and 7 months)


- AWS
- Serverless - API Gateway, Websockets, Lambda
- Ansible
- Terraform
- Kinesis, streams, firehose, data transformation pipelines, log ingestion & enrichment pipelines
- Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana, Fluentbit, Filebeat
- Prometheus, Alertmanager, Grafana
- Docker, ECS
- CI/CD & workflow design - Jenkins, AWX, Pipelines, Jenkinsfile, Teamcity
- Linux (debian, rhel, centos, amzn2)
- Nexus

Pearson - Pearson Frank

Senior Devops Engineer/Consultant (Contract)

London, UK

February 2018 - October 2018 (8 months)


- Environment design, security/system/network design & architecture in AWS
- Large transformation & migration of on prem to AWS
- Terraform
- Architected HA & FT architecture for Hybris & AEM platforms in AWS
- Packer, Ansible role config management, artifact creation (docker images & aws AMI's), some legacy Puppet
- Immutable approach
- Jenkins - CI/CD/Test pipelines + promotions + groovy
- Puppet cleanup contribs to legacy puppet codebase + open source forge module contribs
- Docker
- ECS clusters for several tooling services
- Monitoring tools EKK, NewRelic, Cloudpassage
- Team workflow design - PR review process & CI pipelines
- Lambda serverless
- Hashicorp Vault+Consul POC

BT

Principal Devops Engineer

London, UK

September 2016 - December 2017 (1 year and 3 months)

Continuation of my role with EE after BT acquired EE. Details in EE role below.

EE

Principal DevOps Engineer

London, UK

October 2015 - September 2016 (11 months)

Principal DevOps/Infrastructure engineer at EE. Led a team of 10 engineers on a programme of work to upgrade infrastructure for the ee.co.uk eCommerce site. Architected and led a solution for large-scale provisioning AWS resources with Cloudformation and Python (troposphere). Codebase supported multi-AZ/ region/Account infrastructure deployment in a CI/CD design. Provided Self Serve mechanics via Jenkins to Developers, QA, Testers & other non-technicals to launch environments with Application X at version Y. Also reduced overall AWS spend by introducing a mechanism to persist/un-persist an environment otherwise delete after 19:00 and weekends. So, to not leave environments running or scaled when not in use. I have worked with large Java products SAP's Hybris and Adobes AEM. Scaled Hybris behind a static cache and fine-tuned multiple layers of Hybris object cache. Used Puppet (PE) extensively with roles & profiles to config manage EC2 VMS, docker containers, and local VMS (vagrant). Replaced a legacy SALT Stack implementation. AWS Lambda Python functions are presented as a custom network info resource to Cloudformation and handle requests from the cloudformation API. Returned info at runtime to the Cloudformation API from within AWS - "Poor man's dynamic resource lookups". POC to run DevOps tests across variations of the config management code base using docker + testkitchen + puppet. Think roles+profiles+env_type variations. I coupled this with some basic Rspec and Serverspec tests. Configured CI/CD builds for Devops internal code on PR merges. Trigger a series of build tests. Built & developed separate VPC for Atlassian suite standalone products. EE desired tools + data remain on-premise. V.good knowledge of Jira, Hipchat, Crowd, Bamboo, Confluence, and Bitbucket. Tech stack
- AWS, Linux (Ubuntu), Bash Python, Puppet, Vagrant, Ansible, Cloudformation, Troposphere, Docker, Terraform, Git, Atlassian suite, Jenkins, CI / CD, Java, Hybris, AEM

Kaplan

Senior Devops Engineer

London, UK

February 2015 - October 2015 (8 months)


- AWS Cloud devops architect responsibilities for new project stacks.
- Developed leaner ansible provisioned stack for repeatable small LAMP projects
- Used Nginx GeoIP to route users to language sets and specific content urls.
- Worked heavily on scaling policies/triggers for large kaplaninternational.com ecommerce site.

Kaplan

Devops Engineer

London, UK

May 2014 - January 2015 (8 months)

Large scale migration of business and web systems to AWS. Automation into AWS environment with Cloudformation, config management via Puppet (&puppetdb/mcollective), Fabric (python library) mixed with boto (also a python library) for adhoc task management and machine discovery. Jenkins for providing CI back to non tech users and for periodic job scheduling.
- Developed cloudformation with Python cmd line wrappers to launch AWS resources cross regions.
- Built automated puppetmaster open source setup in AWS using cloudformation + python + puppet + mcollective.
- Migrated several backend and frontend web services from Rackspace to AWS using the new tooling including kaplaninternational.com
- Jenkins + pipelines for app deployment & environment builds
- Configured devops tooling - opsgenie, loggly, splunk, nagios
- Developed pipelines for promotion of new versions of app code alongside specific versions of the infrastructure code
- Developed various puppet modules to automate the configuration of various web platform projects & utility tools
- Used Amazon Linux AMI
- Ruby custom extensions to hiera for alternative backends
- MySQL DBA tasks migration and optimisation of large databases
- Implemented S3FS and SAN

Kaplan

Backend Developer / Integrations engineer

London, UK

January 2013 - September 2013 (8 months)


- Developed bash scripts + capistrano to create repeatable deployment of apps
- Developed complex migration scripts to transform & sanitise datasets
- Optimised environment, build, config use in PHP projects Drupal, Laravel & Wordpress projects
- Used vagrant, vms, and packer to provide developers with repeatable builds & local environments
- Built a Laravel API with Oauth to be consumed by native mobile application
- Brought various Git workflow changes into place, pull-requests, peer reviews, open source workflows

Bytewire Ltd

Founder & Lead Developer @ Agency

September 2007 - December 2012 (5 years and 3 months)

Formed from the bedroom of my final year at university, Bytewire was formed to wrap activities I had been undertaking to build a successful online game, and business. Taking investment in its first year to create a MMORPG (Massively multiplayer online role play game). Provided excellent platform to upskill, deal with real world problems such as bottlenecks in LAMP applications and tie the business side of features into the psychology of a user. Later morphed into a client centric media agency, work can be found @ www.bytewire.co.uk

Barclays Bank

Service Assistant

July 2006 - September 2007 (1 year and 2 months)

Education

  • Bachelor's Degree, Business Administration and Management, General

    University of Kent

    2008

    Bachelor's Degree, Business Administration and Management, General

  • Bachelor of Business & Bachelor of Arts

    University of Kent

    2008

    Bachelor of Business Administration (BBA), Information Technology