Ryan Richards

SUMMARY:

Over twenty years of being directly involved in innovative projects for financial, engineering, and start-up markets, which included experience was gained in both application development and infrastructure roles.

Has extensive experience with Linux servers, databases, and in software development has enabled a deep understanding of the application landscape and development lifecycle.

Has overcome challenges within cloud-native scalability, performance, and security.

Possesses a mature and flexible attitude combined with a passion for best practices, clean architecture, and clean code makes me an effective professional in any environment.

EDUCATION & AFFILIATIONS:

-University of Central Oklahoma - Bachelors Information Systems/Computer Science

-Oracle Education - Development of PL/SQL Program Units, Dallas TX,

-Sun Education - Object-Oriented Analysis and Design using Java and the UML, Chicago IL

-Rational University - Introduction to Clear Case, Clear Quest, Oklahoma City, OK

-BEA Education Services - BEA WebLogic 7.0 Administration, Irving TX

-Member IEEE Computer Society (#90818032)

-Currently preparing for the (CKA) Certified Kubernetes Administrator exam.

EXPERIENCE:

March 2023 – Current

Chick-fil-A Restaurants

Contract Kubernetes Engineer

Collaborated within a sizable, distributed team of seasoned Kubernetes engineers operating within a predominantly GitOps-driven environment leveraging ArgoCD.

Initially tasked with ensuring the timely creation, deployment, and troubleshooting of all Kyverno policies, I successfully met the specified deadline with minimal Kyverno knowledge to begin with. I learned Kyverno and how it worked within the Kubernetes ecosystem in a quick timeframe. Then had to work with various application teams on resolving any policy failures.

Responsibilities included encompassing various tasks involving the administration of Kubernetes, ArgoCD, Kyverno, Datadog, OpsGenie, and a wide variety of Amazon Web Services including EKS operations.

These tasks included alert management (creation and modification) in Datadog and OpsGenie as they were sent to the team.

Led efforts to install Kyverno security policies on a schedule.

Participated in an on-call schedule, where I actively monitored the support channel on Slack, engaging with customers and employing strong communication skills for effective troubleshooting. These tasks involved working with gloo-edge (Envoy), Artifactory and related tools.

Dec 2020 – Jan 2023

Guardtime Federal

Contract Senior Devops and Kubernetes Engineer

Secure project using Azure/GovCloud/AWS and company-owned hardware.

Built and managed Kubernetes clusters on CentOS 8 using Rancher RKE2 distribution as well as building/automating and configuring Azure AKS private clusters and Istio service mesh for secure communications. CI/CD was implemented with Gitlab pipelines for automation and essential functions (e.g. Snyk security scans on containers). This required working closely with developers in order to understand the needs of the business and solving any issues.

Led efforts on training staff with respect to docker, Kubernetes and containerizing their applications as well as deploying their applications with Helm.

Infrastructure automation was achieved with Ansible (for configuration management) and Terraform (for cloud provisioning).

Configured and maintained Gitlab CE environment during development phases. Hashicorp Vault 1.12.4 and Kyverno 1.8.5 were used for secrets and security policies.

Platforms used included CentOS 7, 8, and Ubuntu 22.04.

Lead project efforts for integrating Azure AD with AWS SSO.

Was the primary point of contact for all Kubernetes and cloud issues. I encountered many issues I had not experienced before but was able to follow a pragmatic approach and solved them all.

Aug 2019 – Nov 2020

Molex

Contract Devops

DevOps contract for an international organization using AWS with services including EKS, IOT Core, Lambda, Kafka, EMR and MongoDB, ec2, cloud watch, code commit, code build and more.

All work performed used Docker and/or EKS. Configured Prometheus, Grafana, and Loki to track sensor data in a high-scale environment.

Integrated Prometheus, Grafana and Loki with existing data pipeline to create customized observability dashboards for executives.

Assisted in troubleshooting Lambda functions and various Kubernetes clusters involving performance issues.

April 2016 – July 2019

Numerologist

Contract Devops

Administered services running on Amazon Web Services.

Assisted in migrating all services from Amazon Web Services to Google Cloud platform. Lead DevOps efforts for all projects on a global team behind high traffic websites.

Technical lead on migrating all microservices previously hosted on Google Compute instances & Google App Engine to Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) on google cloud platform with Linkerd service mesh. Terraform and ansible were used as primary tools for creating and provisioning cloud resources.

Was responsible for configuring Kubernetes, deployments, disaster-recovery, architecture, and monitoring. Monitoring was configured via Prometheus and Grafana along with the elastic stack for logging (with and without StackDriver). Other duties included maintaining miscellaneous services in Google Compute along with applicable disaster/recovery and monitoring activities.

Responsible for monitoring cost and keeping services within specified budget.

July 2015 – Feb 2016

Boomer Digital

Contract devops

Built proof of concept Docker Swarm cluster with CoreOS, Consul, and Ansible. Provided support for key clients using technologies including Redis, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB.

Kubernetes installation and configuration on Amazon VPC servers (before the EKS product was released). All work was automated using either puppet, ansible and/or terraform.

Dec 2010 – May 2015

Good Measures

Contract Rails Developer/Devops Engineer

Remote rails developer and lead Devop in distributed team using Amazon Web Services for HIPAA compliant projects.

Provided 24/7 on-call support in addition to daily work tasks. Built multiple environments for various rails application in EC2 and VPC.

Amazon Autoscaling was implemented in production environments. Implemented server monitoring system with sensu. Built PostgreSQL 9.4 cluster using pacemaker, corosync and drbd as proof of concept on Ubuntu 14.04 and red hat enterprise Linux.

Both solutions used assignable elastic ip addresses to work as the cluster ip. I was responsible for training and mentoring junior staff.

Rails development included feature implementation for authentication using authlogic, authorization using cancan, rspec testing, and Capistrano 3 deployment improvements.

Continuous integration was implemented with Solano Labs.

Test coverage was monitored with Code Climate.

Performance monitoring and adjustments used New Relic.

May 2009 – Dec 2010

Real Estate Mogul

Contract Devops

Remote contract as primary Linux administrator for web application services. Technologies used included Percona Server (MySQL), Amazon RDS (MySQL), and MongoDB.

Performance tuning was performed on MongoDB to bring queries taking 60+ seconds down to 1.5 seconds.

Migration from AWS to Google Cloud platform.

June 2007 – May 2009

Freedomsoft

Contract Lead Devops Engineer & Senior Developer

Architected and built production environment (10+ servers). This environment included haproxy clusters for managing load across multiple servers. Load balancers were configured with heartbeat for failover, and mysql master-slave replication spread across multiple servers was the primary datasource. Chef server was used for a subset of configuration management with chef-clients running on all servers. Munin and collectd were used for metrics analysis. Nagios was the primary monitoring application and was used for all servers. Backups primarily relied on vendor backup services and duplicity backups scripted for use with amazon s3. Amazon Web Services with OpsWorks, VPC, EBS, RDS, EIP, ELB. MongoDB replica sets were utilized. Google Cloud Services was also used for specific solutions.

Remote rails developer previously for front-end and back-end applications including domain registration wizard with auto configuration for personalized domains and websites within the application. Other development work included refactoring existing code and advising on best practices regarding development processes for teams.

Wrote api wrappers for api services being used inside the application.

Wrote code to integrate with google maps, and Microsoft Bing maps services.

Led the effort on tuning existing code using new relic and metric_fu resources.

Design patterns and best-practices were adhered to and recommended for all work. Tests were written using rspec and cucumber.

* Please note: At this point in my career I switched to contract focused assignments.

March 2003 – June 2007

PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP

Senior J2EE Developer

Lead and Senior Developer roles for large-scale web applications serving 30,000 employees. Applications functionally supported ethics and compliance for accounting purposes in regard to accounting, IRS and security regulations.

Dec, 2000 –Feb, 2003

AtkinsBenham

Senior Software Developer

October, 1999 – Nov, 2000

ThinkSpark

Oracle Consultant

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