Cloud Competencies
With many years exposure to cloud computing at an enterprise level, backed by a proven track record for delivery. I am the trusted professional with a depth of knowledge and experience to help realise your cloud computing goals. This is in addition to over two decades of solid Internet, security, and various other competencies.
Public Cloud
With over 4 years experience using Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure spread over multiple projects and companies, I have amassed a wealth of knowledge on a majority of the top public cloud providers' services.
Managing from concept through to implementation, I was exclusively responsible for producing a managed service to enable secure and monitored connectivity between systems hosted in different locations be this public cloud, hosted solutions, or on premises data centres. This enabled a local authority to build their Digital Service Hub using the Salesforce platform with key APIs buried deep within their complex on-premise infrastructure, and received universal industry accolade. Built on the AWS platform using multiple third party and open source components, I later productised the managed service including a G-Cloud service definition for reselling on the public sector digital marketplace. Other notable assignments include the senior consultant responsible for the design and build of a central government department's critical data and application platform using pioneering technology to bolster security
I was hired at the world's leading chemistry community, advancing excellence in the chemical sciences as the technical lead on the design and implementation of the organisations next generation make-or-break global service platform (comprising Linux, MarkLogic and Windows), built upon a collection of AWS services (using Amazon EC2, EBS, RDS, ELB, VPC, Route 53, S3, CloudFront, SQS, SES, SNS, ElastiCache and CloudWatch). Providing suitable levels of performance, resilience, scalability and value. Looking to achieve maximum levels of automation to bolster quality and drive efficiencies. Also, pioneering the adoption of NoSQL database technology with MarkLogic. I quickly become the technical evangelist and trusted advisor for many dependant technologies was asked to actively participate in the technology community.
Whilst working for one of the UK's largest generation groups I was responsible for the design, planning and technical lead implementing of a pioneering, inexpensive and highly scalable DR solution using scalable AWS services (using Amazon EC2, EBS, VPC, CloudFormation services). Also, working within the agile framework, I was the technical lead from the organisation working on the migration of a £50M+/month line-of-business billing platform (comprising Linux, Oracle and Windows technologies) from on premise to a highly available and secure AWS environment (using Amazon EC2, EBS, VPC, Route 53 and CloudWatch services). See media for associated case studies
To prove that I eat my own dog food, this website is wholly hosted using a serverless Public Cloud architecture; this comprises of static web files hosted out of Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) object storage and fronted using Amazon CloudFront global content delivery network (CDN), with an EV certificate provisioned using AWS Certificate Manager (ACM). Dynamic elements like the contact form have been built using an Amazon DynamoDB NoSQL database service, Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) email service, Amazon API Gateway, and AWS Lambda Function-as-a-Service. This provides a reliable, performant, and secure solution for very little monthly investment.
Private Cloud
I was the technical lead on a project to deliver this FTSE 250 financial media companies next generation hosting platform capable of carrying its online media services beyond the lifespan of its existing environment and for many years beyond. This involved both a migration and on-the-fly transformation, since the operating system and applications were also end-of-life and in desperate need of attention.
This included private cloud procurement (thorough a comprehensive ITT process) with a value of £10M+. Major project deliverables included:
- Increase reliability through the provision of high availability throughout the design, removing all single points of failure to diminish the risk of reputational damage and commercial loss caused by unplanned service downtime
- Significantly overcome legacy performance issues and provided a uniform experience for international audiences, with future options for emerging markets
- Introduction of separate environments for development, testing and UAT in addition to production to deliver website enhancements to the audience quicker and with fewer errors
- Hardware abstraction for improved agility, scalability and reliability coupled with the ability to utilise cloud infrastructure to burst into as required (such as seasonal demand, product launches, etc.)
- Migrate all 300 undocumented websites and services to the new platform and switch over to the new services with minimal disruption.
The platform comprised of private cloud for core services, VPDC to service seasonal demand spikes and prototyping, with a combination of managed and unmanaged elements, with a sophisticated HA security and load balancing infrastructure.
This high risk make-or-break project took just months to complete with no consultancy assistance and was seamlessly implemented over one weekend with negligible downtime. The project team successfully delivered this complex migration and transformation project to quality, time and budget and something that received universal praise from all parts of the business. I also picked up the 2012 IT Excellence Award for my contribution to the projects success.
VPDC
I first utilised Virtual Private Data Centre (VPDC) while working for Euromoney to enable the quick provisioning of short-term development and test workloads that could interconnect with the Private cloud. This self-service, hourly-billable solution gave the organisation the agility and cost optimisation needed to successfully build a proof of concept for its strategic next-generation content delivery platform and better explore devops tooling requirements.
SaaS
Ahead of its time back at the turn of the millennium, I was involved as the infrastructure lead with a software house offering its customers access to a utility service via a web portal in what is now common place and termed Software as a Service (SaaS). I have also lead on a project delivering a complex Win32-based application to local authorities using a robust Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) solution. This included a large server farm capable of serving over 4000 users and up to 850 concurrent sessions.
In this time I also planned and controlled a complex co-location data centre move between suppliers and data centres - all completed within a single weekend and minimal downtime.
I also helped the organisation achieved the ISO27001 security accreditation for the hosted infrastructure and introduced tailored ITIL best practices to drive efficiencies within the operations of the IT team.
