Richard Lees

Director & Lead Engineer

Contract DevOps Engineer

At Arden there were two projects to deliver: an Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) based platform and development of their serverless integrations. A new platform was required to migrate existing on-premises and Amazon EC2 workloads to. The new platform allowed developers to securely deploy their applications as well as diagnose problematic deployments without being blocked waiting for infrastructure engineers to assist. This was achieved with ArgoCD which allows developers to see the state, recent logs and events of their applications. Grafana, Prometheus and Loki were used for centralising logs and metrics as well as raising alerts to help with the diagnosis and even the prevention of problems. Administrative tasks such as DNS record management and TLS certificate management were fully automated with Certificate Manager and External DNS. In order to be future ready, the platform was developed and tested with support for IPv6 and ARM-based compute allowing for easy adoption later on. All infrastructure supporting the platform is ‘as code’, mainly in Terraform, allowing easy management, upgrades and replication. Arden also implemented a new student record system called SITS. This was a large project that affected all areas of the business. A major component of this project was integrating many other systems that are not directly compatible with SITS, such as the virtual learning environment, Active Directory, time tabling products and many more. The integrations had to be event driven and accommodate complicated business logic. Additionally, the systems to be integrated spanned across both AWS and Azure as well as Software as a Service (SaaS) offerings. The technologies used in the solution included: Typescript based Lambda functions deployed with the Amazon CDK, Azure Logic Apps, Azure Functions, Amazon SNS & SQS and Azure Service Bus. During this project, contributions were made to open source projects including External DNS for Kubernetes and Prometheus.

Contract DevOps Engineer

A part time project where the main goal was to implement Azure Front Door into the existing infrastructure automation to improve security and performance of an application with hundreds of tenants. Performance improvements were achieved by leveraging caching, compression and the content delivery network to service static and cached content from regional distribution points. To improve security Front Door Web Application Firewall (WAF) was used to identify improvements in the application such as ways to filter/encode data that was transmitted to/from the application and customers web browsers. The WAF also enabled visibility to how the site was currently being scraped/attacked and potential mitigation. The existing infrastructure automation was primarily in Bicep and PowerShell, both of which were new to me. This helped bring me more up to date with the Microsoft toolset and allowed for contrast with the alternative open source tools that I have used heavily before. As well as delivering Front Door, other small tasks carried out included creating another environment with infrastructure as code which required heavy refactoring. The refactoring was mainly converting scripted PowerShell steps into proper infrastructure as code (Bicep in this case) and fixing infrastructure deployment pipelines that were failing for various reasons.

Contract DevOps Engineer

A project to pick up support for and improve an existing Kubernetes based infrastructure platform hosted on Microsoft Azure. Initially, the primary focus had been to automate continual time consuming tasks and to reduce the number of support tickets. This has been achieved by implementing technologies such as External DNS for Kubernetes and Certificate Manager. Reliability has been improved by consolidating and improving complex build pipelines by utilising YAML libraries for Azure DevOps and introducing infrastructure as code with Terraform. After stabilising the platform focus shifted to evolving the platform to be more performant, scalable and developer friendly. ArgoCD was implemented allowing developers to version control their applications configuration and 'self-serve' deployments all the way up to production. All core infrastructure provisioning was automated with Terraform as were any new services that were launched. As the platform grew further Thanos was implemented to handle the large amount of metric data produced and allow a single pane of glass view across multiple Kubernetes clusters for monitoring. Significantly more people are now buying cars online. The evolution of the infrastructure platform helped Drivvn to meet their customers growing needs. Having the infrastructure as code ready also allowed us to work with one of the Drivvn development teams to deliver a new product from inception to launch within a few weeks. The initial infrastructure was provisioned and available within hours. We then worked with the team to refine the build pipelines and infrastructure as they developed the product. Since launch, the infrastructure supporting this product has been extremely reliable and developers are able to safely test and deploy changes without being blocked by other teams.

Contract DevOps Engineer

An exciting greenfield project creating a new infrastructure platform using Amazon Web Services, Docker and Kubernetes for SAP Commerce based e-commerce websites. The result of this project allows Eclipse to offer their customers an improved hosting service. Development environments can be provisioned rapidly and easily decommissioned when not in use to match project demands. Automatic scaling allows customers websites to seamlessly handle high load during sales and events whilst running economically during quiet periods. The platform allows for zero-downtime code deployments and platform updates. High availability was achieved by always running across multiple availability zones (data centres) in addition to having automatic health checks and repairs. Infrastructure code was defined in Terraform making it as easy as possible to use additional cloud providers later on. Having infrastructure defined as code also brought other benefits such as: provisioning in a reliable and repeatable way, vast reduction in the possibility of human error and when coupled with Jenkins allows provisioning at the click of a button. As well as delivering the platform, existing teams were assisted with picking up new tools, technologies and concepts to enable on-going development and support of the platform. Customers live on this platform so far include Joules and Mamas & Papas.

Senior DevOps Engineer

Solutions Architect

Technical Lead

3rd Line IT Support Engineer