Portfolio
The below is a snapshot of some of the most impactful projects I have worked on during my career as a Lead DevOps Engineer and Principal Solutions Architect. It is not an exhaustive list but captures some of the notable work. All of these are projects where I was the individual contributor building the system, performing the cloud engineering, running production operations, or was the lead architect overseeing the implementation.
Scaling a popular mobile game to new regions
I helped this company revamp their AWS environment after an incident where their production EC2 instances hosting MongoDB were deleted after a botched CloudFormation Stackset change. I rewrote their infra templates with Terraform, coded in as much security/policy about accidental resource deletion, instituted automated backups, setup automated deployments of app and infra w/ Jenkins, redeployed applications into ECS on EC2, implemented instance scaling, and implemented automated MongoDB cluster node provisioning. We reworked their application to expose key metrics to system health and setup a CloudWatch dashboard for observability. We did this in time for a release to open the game up for use in South Korea which nearly doubled their player count and drove a large revenue increase.
Improving cloud security for a fintech platform
I helped this company improve their cloud security posture following a data breach. My team migrated them away from the Splunk product suite and into the CrowdStrike Next-Gen SIEM product, setting up integrations for all their various systems and platforms to send logs into the NGS platform, writing the policies and logic to setup filters and alerts.
Cloud migration for electronic medical records company
I helped this company plan and execute a complex migration from a data center into AWS. They were faced with a looming deadline of a hardware refresh and agreement expiration; a several million dollar price tag. I did an in-depth assessment of their compute and storage infrastructure, determined an appropriate system build for an AWS deployment, and worked with their team to plan the migration of resources and cutover of the platform. The migration would have an up-front cost but would reduce opex by $1.5m with further room for optimization. The customer agreed and the migration was executed in 5 months, just under the deadline to exit the data center.
Launching a new mobile game
I helped this company plan and launch a mobile game as part of a social media product feature launch (Snap Games). I helped them deploy their game backend using AWS GameLift and DynamoDB, developed some custom orchestration tooling to automate releases and game fleet management, and implemented custom websocket load testing to evaluate the performance of the system. After working with the customer we were able to identify application bottlenecks, make adjustments, and help them go-live.
Rearchitecting a retail company
I helped this company rearchitect their systems to alleviate bottlenecks which were hindering their ability to scale for large traffic events. When running marketing and discount campaigns their site would be taken offline with the influx of traffic. I worked with them to migrate their existing NFS setup, running on a single EC2 instance, into a highly performant AWS Elastic Filesystem, move static load balanced machines into an autoscaling group with highly sensitively tuned scaling parameters, and command line tools which facilitate manual scale-ups, queueing to incrementally process orders, and a CDN to offset compute requirements. The customer was able to operate a streamlined infrastructure to gracefully handle traffic surges to keep their site online.
AWS migration for 3d printing and manufacturing company
I helped this 3d printing company migrate their data centers to AWS to avoid a costly license renewal and hardware refresh. It was an extremely complicated migration due to the massive scale of their storage arrays and ZFS cluster. They needed a custom implementation to migrate their data in a feasible way. The customer was able to cutover into production and start optimizing their infrastructure.
Akamai CDN migration for a consumer device retailer
I helped this company migrate their Akamai CDN for a component of their IoT smart plug line-up in order to avoid a massive renewal fee. CloudFront was seen as the most viable option but did not have native smart routing functionality, however, there was a recent integration with Lambda to run functions at the edge. There was a complex implementation of Lambda@Edge functions to replicate functionality. The software was developed in NodeJS with CloudFormation IaC and deployed in the customer account. The cutover was successful and customer was operating in production for the workload at a greatly reduced cost.
Solidity web3 for a crypto artist platform
I helped this Web3 crypto company build their entire artist marketing and asset platform by writing smart contracts for their token integrations, developing the backend and frontend for the product, creating digital art galleries, and decentralized and centralized storage deployment of several terabytes worth of artwork from hundreds of artists. The company went on to collect royalties from millions of dollars of revenue from sales.
US pageant event hosting and operations
I helped this organization run their technology and development operations and provided on-call support for their televised pageant events. This was in our data center so we scaled for peak load. Some events would hit critical copmpute thresholds due to website voting and mass surge in traffic so we scaled up compute and quickly got configurations deployed with Ansible Playbooks and into the load balancers rotation. We kept their systems online at their most critical times.
Hosting company large-scale DNS migration
I helped this hosting company perform a DNS migration to a more modern and streamlined open source version. The migration was extremely complex and extremely high risk, potentially impacting service to hundreds of customers in their hosting portfolio. I developed custom Python code to assemble all of the DNS records, export them to a canonical format, issue commands to lower TTLs, generate the shell commands needed to create the records on the other side, and perform an audit of all records to confirm integrity between name servers. Due to the nature of the DNS setup a single cutover was required for all domains. The cutover was executed and worked without a hitch.