What I've done

A list of work projects

Jelly Boats

Here is a list of what I have put together or worked on for some significant amount over the last couple of years on the job.

  • Monitoring will get its own post eventually.
  • We migrated from a single service which ran on a single instance in Classic EC2 to a half dozen services running in separate VPCs, each with autoscaling instances behind an elastic load balancer to provide high availability. Getting all the plumbing on this right was a major effort.
  • We also shifted our configuration management system from exclusively Puppet at first to Chef, where we could take better advantage of community-written cookbooks, and then brought
  • Wrote an automation script which packaged service config files into a Debian package which would simply be pulled into a new instance like any other versioned package.
  • Worked on a couple iterations of an ELK stack in order to accept logs and structured data
  • Prototyped a stack which used Amazon IoT, Kinesis Firehose, DynamoDB, and S3 to accept mobile data streams and store them for business intelligence. The components were held together with Simple Notification Service and Lambda functions in a serverless fashion.
  • Hacked out numerous one-off scripts in bash and Ruby to automate the recurring maintenance chores in our environments. For instance we needed something to clean up user logins which were not needed any more, scripts to take reference snapshots of volumes for safekeeping, and so on.
  • Worked on some scripts to transfer information from our services to a data warehouse running on Amazon Redshift (so-called ETL scripts) so we would have an analytics service for our own use.
  • Migrated some administrative tools off of dedicated virtual machines onto containers which would run under Rancher. The idea was that we could pack a bunch of light-duty tasks together on a cluster of instances which would run the same workloads with much higher density, reducing costs and maintenance.
  • Wrote a simple Sinatra app which would gather information from our environments (addresses, instance IDs, running state, and so on) and display them in a tabular format. This saved me a lot of time switching between different dashboards and running things through the command line interface just to keep things oriented.
  • Kept track of our hosting costs in order to find out where we could benefit from terminating instances or phasing out legacy services.
 
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