March 2016 - Now

Job title: DevOps Engineer

As a DevOps engineer the role covers all aspects of managing datacenter operations, from building new networking, the servers and installing services such as PHP and MySQL. Managing users on servers, adding new staff and removing leavers. Security hardening of both instances and the AWS infrastructure.

supporting the internal IT team, this includes updating config in Jamf the MDM system and general user issues.

Role involves:

• supporting staff with all in-house IT systems
• supporting staff with laptop issues
• supporting ingoing datacenter operations

History

I have been at Mayden for 10 year's, in this time I have helped to move office twice. This has involved setting up the new office with internet access and networking, both wired and WiFi using Unifi. Decommissioning the old office and removing all IT related kit.

I have overseen the migration from our Colo datacenter operations into a private cloud provider, then from private cloud to AWS. Both migrations have allowed us to expand our capability's, both in terms of building new infrastructure and modernising our tooling.

I headed up the research and actual migration from Colo to privative cloud, that involved comparing costs of the big 3 cloud providers and smaller companies that connect to the NHS. Then setting up connections to the new private cloud provider, building out the infrastructure ready to receive our data. Testing and re-testing the migration process, with the final migration and cut over.

I was heavily involved in migration from private cloud to AWS, this involved using an external contractor to scope out and provide starting terraform. Learning terraform to provision the landing zone, write new terraform to provision new instances in AWS to transfer data to and migrating some old vms to AWS. Then clean up of the private cloud provider and finally closing the account.

I have helped in setting up a Jamf a new MDM system to manage the fleet macs, this involved the onboarding of the systems team and creating config in Jamf to install and update applications.

I have introduced an automation system to run our ansible tooling in AWS, this has reduced our management overhead when building new instances and updating running instances.

I have been involved in a migration from MySQL master/slave to Galera clusters, part of that work was to build the clusters and get Galera settings tuned. We now run 36 clusters in our main application.