George is a leading DevOps engineer, systems architect, strategic advisor, and digital transformation specialist with a strong background in building secure and scalable platforms for small enterprises and SMEs. He has over 16 years of experience in technical roles and 11 years of experience in senior leadership positions, also directing his own consultancy business. George is highly-skilled in Docker, Kubernetes, Cloud, and configuration management solutions.
Delivers CI/CD as part of an agile team in improving performance by automating and streamlining operations and processes.
Helps build and improve infrastructure, application and performance development and ensures tight security including data encryption, security groups, and environment scanning.
Ensures high-quality deliverables and implements DevOps and security best practices in fast-paced environments.
Worked on the redesign and optimization of a .NET core Docker image build process, migrating Jenkins builds to Kubernetes and moving Docker image caching to AWS EFS.
Managed to speed up build times by 40% across the board while saving costs. Developed reusable, highly-available Terraform modules for AWS, S3 cross-zone replication, and EKS clusters with IAM integration using OIDC and Route53 latency-based records for Content Distribution Network (CDN).
Implemented a secure Azure environment in Terraform, as well as privately zoned AKS Kubernetes and high availability SQL Server Enterprise.
Managed to to simplify and secure client's data and speed up client on-boarding by implementing rearchitected AWS cloud environments.
Appplied AWS Transit Gateway in Terraform to partition clients with separate VPCs and designed permission boundaries for AWS IAM roles.
Redesigned Jenkins CI/CD pipelines for reducing team friction, achieving cost reduction and a faster time-to-market. Deployed AWS services using Terraform, AirGapped VPC's using TransitGateway, a Docker application provisioning on EC2, ECS Logstash cluster, and HA cron-jobs using Fargate spot instances and CloudWatch.
Used a 5-node multi-master Kubernetes cluster on VMware to centralize and secure business operations, implementing a high availability on-premises infrastructure platform .
Developed tools to Failover Cisco firewall/switch network routes, transfer domain controller FSMO roles, activate passive DFS fileserver node, switch CNAMEs, and failover AlwaysOn SQL Server databases.
Created a single-sign-on Python analytics environment using JupyterHub, Enterprise Gateway, and Nginx.
Achieved improved efficiency of product development teams by enhancing CI/CD strategies to reduce build times to less than 7 minutes.
Designed internal security policies to align business workflow and processes with data vendor requirements and industry standards.
Migrated services from on-premise to cloud whilst moving away from enterprise stack (Microsoft, VMware, Nutanix) to open-source solutions. Developed infra-as-code templates to deploy scalable and immutable infrastructure for Docker container orchestrators.
Migrated the organisation from email only alerting to RightItNow alert management system using SNMPProxy and ActiveMQ running High Availability on Windows Server. Created failover documentation that was adopted by the software vendor for their official failover documentation.
Designed and deployed a secure offline on-premise accounting domain hosting SAP Business One and CoreSuite Cube.
Developed PowerShell scripts to monitor infrastructure and generate reports. Migrated a small business of 15 people from physical infrastructure to virtualised servers running on HA VMware cluster.
To deploy .NET Core applications, a customer requested a portable CI/CD implementation. They wanted to be able to run builds on-premises as well as in the cloud. Each component had to be able to manage resource failures, be scalable and stable, and update with no downtime. All resources were created in infra-as-code, which I proposed, planned, and implemented: Terraform, Jenkins Groovy DSL pipelines, Kubernetes, and Helm templating. The new solution's functionalities were delivered in four months, resulting in a fully integrated development experience for new features and applications, decreasing friction among development and infrastructure teams, and increasing service reliability and performance.
The development of a stable, scalable, and high-availability virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) environment for screening candidates with technical tests was a fun and interesting project that the client requested. The client needed candidate environments to be categorized according to their function, scaling to hundreds of desktops and down to zero when not in use, the ability to adjust the keyboard region/layout depending on the candidate, DNS whitelisting policies in effect for outbound traffic, and to consolidate desktop configuration controls based on position, clipboard, hardware devices, SSH access, and desktop it. As the infrastructure layer, I proposed and implemented the deployment of a Kubernetes cluster with node auto-scaling. Helm was used for deploying the NoMachine server and Ubuntu container Virtual Desktops. Later, the system was used to safely build algorithms by their external data science development teams.
Education
Bachelor of Engineering degree in Electronic Engineering and Cybernetics
