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I solve difficult and challenging DevOps problems - IaaS, CI/CD, HA, DR, Azure, AWS, Kafka, Solr.
Immediate availability for urgent or emergency situations.
NonStopOps is an exclusive IT consultancy through which I provide solutions to difficult DevOps and Cloud challenges. I specialise in all the usual DevOps concerns, as well as architecture for Azure, AWS and data-driven platforms.
I have 30 years of experience in every area of IT and with dozens of technologies and paradigms. But most importantly, I have a track record of designing and building highly-performant, highly-stable, easily-manageable and cost effective IT systems. My success is based on my talent for modelling complex systems and processes in a way that addresses not just core business requirements, but the concerns of project management, functionality, stability, performance and long-term management.
I work with clients of all sizes all over the world, especially in emergency or short-term focused engagements.
Listed below are my primary service areas.
Clients often call me in for urgent implementation or remediation services. Here are some examples of past work I've done like this:
- Go-live architectural review to address possible performance and scalability issues
- Debugging and fixing of Kafka issues (broker, connect) in large clusters
- Remediation of Cloud security gaps (private routing/endpoints, firewall rules, NSGs, hardened images)
- Filling monitoring and logging gaps in complex Cloud-based systems
- Reverse engineering manual cloud infrastructure setup for conversion to Terraform
- Set-up of a new AWS/Azure region/AZ for DR purposes
- Implementation of DevOps pipelines using GitLab, GitHub, Azure DevOps, Jenkins, etc.
My technical specialisations include: Azure & AWS (infrastructure, architecture, scalability, performance, networking, security), DevOps (Terraform, Azure DevOps, GitLab, GitHub, DevSecOps) and data-processing technologies (Kafka, Solr, Lucene, Elasticsearch, Mongo, RDBMSes, Hadoop, Storm).
Generally I price these engagements by the day or as a monthly retainer, obviously depending on the situation. Contact me to find out more.
I've been doing DevOps long before it was called that. As a system engineer or sysadmin back in the day, my approach was always holistic. To this day, wherever I work I focus on automating and improving processes like testing, deployment, change control, logging, monitoring and remote management.
I have extensive experience in designing and implementing one-click deployments, automatic full-stack failover or single-pane-of-glass dashboards.
Some examples of my past DevOps work include:
- CI/CD design and setup using Gitlab and Github
- Multi-cloud IaaS using Terraform
- Custom test pipelines using packer and pxe-boot
- Greenfield DevOps IaaS & CI/CD design & deployment using Terraform and Azure DevOps
- Python-based SRE scripting for monitoring custom federated clusters using Consul, Vault, Nomad
- Organisational-level DevOps tooling and security implementations
- Single-pane-of-glass dashboard design in Datadog, Splunk and Azure
- Design and implementation leadership for a holistic logging & monitoring approach across a complex hardware infrastructure
I have been designing and implementing cloud architectures for 15 years, starting with AWS, OpenStack and then Azure. I've architected pure-Cloud, hybrid-Cloud and multi-cloud infrastructures and applications.
What I have learned during all this time is that there is no reason why you can't have an architecture that meets your requirements for scalability, performance, security and availability AND doesn't break the bank. Many times I find overly complex application designs using a sprawling complex of cloud services when a small bit of smart coding is all that is needed. There are nearly always ways to implement simpler, more stable and more cost effective designs.
My unique approach uses cloud technologies intelligently. I only recommend designs and technical strategies that are practically feasible and easily implementable. I never design anything without having built at least a prototype of it, and I never recommend any technology without having personally used it.
Some examples of my past cloud work include:
- Design, deployment and management of a global Azure infrastructure supporting multiple high-performance services
- Infrastructure design and deployment of a custom global, multi-cloud, Kubernetes-based PaaS (AWS and Azure)
- Cloud architecture design for a bespoke enterprise cloud
- Implementation and management of large Kafka clusters in AWS and Azure
- Holistic logging & monitoring of complex Azure/AWS-based systems
- Disaster recovery (vm to regional-level scenarios) design and implementation
Let me know how I can help.