Configuration Management Process Improvement

James Sparenberg

Hollister, CA *****

Email: *****@***********.**

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/james-sparenberg

Skills:

System Architecture, Vendor Relations, Design implementation, FIM, SEIM, Vuln Assessment and Remediation, Containers and Orchestration (Docker and Kubernetes) Configuration Management, Product testing and Evaluation, Security and vulnerability remediation, Cloud Linux, Bash, Python, WSL, CLI, GIT (GitHub, GitLab and Bitbucket) Product Migration, Working with Non-Technical teams on Technical Issues, VMWare, Containerization, Learning new products and Tools fast, Self Disciplined and Motivated.

Tools:

DataDog, Nagios, Prometheus, Grafana, R.U.M, Synthetic Monitoring, eBPF, Wahzuh, OSSEC, aws(aws-cli), gcloud, az(azure-cli) Co-Pilot, Puppet, Salt, Ansible, Satellite, RPM, DEB, SSL, Tomcat, SSH, NetCAT, tcpDump, Ethereal and Wireshark, Linux CLI, Powershell, GitHub, GitLab, BitBucket, GIT, Satellite, Docker, Rancher, Kubernetes, (AKS,EKS and GKS), Virtualization Products (VMWare, GCS, AzureVM, KVM) Cloud (Google, Azure, AWS), Lucid Charts, Jira, Confluence, Wiki, Office, ITUL, DevSecOps.

Professional Summary

●10+ years working with Unix/Linux

●ITIL Certified

●Worked extensively in building and designing Puppet, Salt and Ansible automation and configuration management.

●Designed Product testing Env for Product evaluation, ran those test, aggregated the data and presented recommendations on products to management

●Worked with Purchasing Depts to get Vendor Contracts approved.

●Worked with Vendors

●Named in patent applications for work in RPM package management

●Worked as a volunteer in Linux users groups, assisting other users with problems and troubleshooting

●Serve on Board of local Car club.

●Worked with Docker, Kubernetes and associated products.

●Taken multiple projects from Concept through design and on to actual rollout

●Hands on when needed.

●Security focused

Professional Experience

Beacon Hill Consulting

Assigned to ADT US Based Jan 2024 - Jul 2024

Consultant to head up a number of projects in a rapidly consolidating environment.

Evaluate and recommend product for consolidation of Source control. Using data driven methods

Develop tools need to grab repos from multiple sources (Git SVN and TFS) to insert into a single git product.

Build out the infrastructure for an in house git service.

Create plan for migration

Document Processes Procedures and Diagram Architecture.

Run the migration

Deploy tools to assist end users in migration of their existing code.

Integrate multiple tools into the product.

Create Container based environments for build infrastructure.

Design and build out k8s and VM based environments for the CI/CD development team to work with and develop on

Assist in building out a container repo inside Google

Working with GKE GCS and numerous other Google cloud products.

Harness Inc Principal CSE San Francisco April 2023 - September 2023

●As a newly minted CSE I'm working with

●Learning Harness suite of products

●Working with the team to automate where possible our functions and processes.

●Primary work in on prem installations

●Object would have been to move to Federal Accounts

●The products are in the CI/CD realm, with a full suite of services to take away the drudgery of pipline creation and enable a shift left without having to build a new team on your left.

MBO Partners

Senior SRE – Assigned to PwC Digital Dallas Tx Nov 2020 – Jan 2023

●Wrote tools to include one manage securely kubeconfig files for access to various products

●Worked with managers to create an SRE and Ops team from the ground up

●Worked in Azure AWS and GCP clouds

●Worked with AKS GKE and EKS

●Wrote documentation using Confluence, PowerPoint and Google Docs

●Mentored a number of Jr Admins

●Developed the SRE software stack, then wrote the needed documents on how to deploy this stack into both Windows and MAC laptops.

●Worked with wide variety of teams, from multiple companies

●Worked the test and acceptance of DataDog and stood up most of the initial Alerts and Dashboards that later formed the basis of my clients Monitoring and Alerting network.

●Wrote Synthetic and Static tests for systems.

●Served as oncall on a rotating basis

AeroTek Inc Hanover MD Jul 2020 - Oct 2020

Assigned to HMI Inc

●Provided Mentorship and assistance to team members, on Linux, Kubernetes and Docker

●Converted 2 proprietary and unique servers into both docker/K8s containers and WSL enabled file systems

●Wrote installers and uninstallers for the two WSL environments

●Working with the Artifactory team, got in house Registries built for our docker/k8s environments to use

●Developed process and documentation for updating and modifying the above WSL systems

●Documented usage of the Docker Registry (in house)

●Created method for Vanilla CentOS 7/8 and Fedora33 for WSL

●Began working on creating Puppet/Terraform code to recreate the systems from scratch

●Worked heavily in VDI testing for the company

●Converted RHEL8 deploy into a first draft terraform module

LendingClub Inc San Francisco CA Dec 2018 – April 2020

SecOps Principal – Team Lead

●Designed methodology for testing of FIM product to meet the needs of Lending Club InfoSec

●Developed F.I.M. Monitoring for k8s / Docker in co-operation with the SecOps team.

●Deployed test Framework to validate if docker/k8s F.I.M. testing was successful or not.

●Wrote the tests to ensure that all vendors where tested evenly

●Implemented the tests and collated the data gathered.

●Made recommendations based on the data and push through the product to purchase and roll out.

●Took over Salt infrastructure and redesigned it.

●Wrote all modules for system management in Python and Jinja

●Rolled out the improved infrastructure and ensured that it would meet the teams needs

●Incorporated new salt state files and grains (that I wrote) to meet the needs of the team

●Worked with multiple teams to roll out a new asset management product.

●Built the modules, tested them and put them into action to ensure, inventory management, and FIM were on all systems at Lending Club

●Managed the Triage of scan results from Qualys scans

●Assigned tickets based on those scans or presented data driven mitigation as required.

●Mentored Jr personnel and others to assist them in learning and growing in their jobs.

●Provided proper upstream feedback to ensure that management knew the progress of my team and my teams projects.

●Worked with the AWS team on compliance and development of our AWS security strategies.

●Worked on changing from SaltStack to AWS SSM

●Gave talk at Annual INNOVATE Conference on Monitoring best design practices

●As a SecOps Team lead worked with tools and development team for security in terraform rollout.

Eliassen Group Santa Clara CA May 2018 – Nov 2018

Assigned to Ericsson Inc.

●DevOps Team Member

●Designed Prometheus based federated Monitoring system

●Deployed the Monitoring system and built require dashboards

●Worked in Go Templates (for HELM)

●Worked on and developed ways to monitor LTE radio equipment with Prometheus

●Created POC to demonstrate the advantages of Consul over etcd

●Created POS to demonstrate using Consul for automated monitoring and service discovering with Prometheus

●Built installation media for company product for use by Radio team

●Created documentation in a step by step format for the team to be able to re-create all of the products and processes I built.

●Deploying Helm modules Modifying to fit needs

●Writing Helm modules for unique apps and company needs

●Working with and in GKE/Kubernetes (Google Kubernetes Environment)

●Developed deployment of our containers into Intel NUC systems running CoreOS in an automated fashion

●Worked with GitLab/Git/and Gitlab CI/CD

●Designing and building out a full Prometheus monitoring Environment in GKE

●Working with Docker Env, and integration of Docker and Kubernetes.

●Testing and verification of all code checked into Git

CloudSimple Santa Clara CA Aug 2017 – May 2018

●SRE for Mixed Env of Azure VMs combined with Kubernetes Application Deployment

●Creating Policy and procedures for a new Environment and product.

●Developed Prometheus monitoring of k8s deployed and VMware deployed systems

●Testing deployment procedures etc using Terraform, Ansible and make scripts.

●Worked with Azure Environments, command line (azure-cli) and portal

●Assisted in the design and then did the deployment of Prometheus monitoring.

●Wrote Grafana Dashboards

●Worked in Jira, Confluence and Gitlab

●Wrote and utilized bash scripts to automate the deployment of Prometheus Configs and exporters.

Team People Reston Virginia Sept 2016 - July 2017

Assigned to AJ+

Sr DevOps Engineer

●Designed, deployed, and maintained puppet system

●Wrote, tested, and deployed, necessary puppet modules

●Designed, deployed, and maintained Check_MK monitoring system (Nagios) along with puppet module for deployment of agent

●Worked extensively with AWS EC2, Redshift, Route53, VPC etc.

●Built and deployed Docker Containers

●Worked with Docker swarm to ensure redundancy in our product.

●Built dev network

●Assisted team, where ever possible, in developing a News, CMS

●Built DNS system

●Built out, in house VMWare system

●Built Docker Registry for in house use

●Worked with Github

●Built ELK stack and Puppet module for deployment of agent

●Documentation of all systems deployed into Jira Confluence.

●Worked with Jira

●Worked in MySQL and Tableau

●Worked on getting the analytics team into Amazon RDS(MySQL) and RedShift

Taos Inc. (Now a division of IBM) San Jose, CA October 2013 – Sept 2016

Assigned to Synaptics Inc

Sr. Linux Admin/Puppet master

●Created comparison matrix for deciding on best Configuration Management Matrix at Synaptics

●Designed the deployment steps and procedure.

●Integrated new Puppet environment into existing support Infrastructure (VMware, Git etc)

●Created full documentation and network maps for new environment

●Wrote installers for Puppet servers to build out systems automatically and in a repeatable fashion.

●Build modules when required for Linux hardening

●Deployed puppet masters and clients to over 500 systems worldwide.

●Co-ordinated with team members to handle the deployment.

Assigned to MerchantE-solutions.

Sr. Linux Admin/Puppet master

●Headed up project to convert 2 Data Centers to using External NTP time sync. Successfully deployed this without data loss or customer interruption

●Worked as a lead on team designing, building and deploying a new data center and it’s equipment

●Designed an “All in one” server that provided all necessary tools and services to allow the team to remotely build the systems in the Data Center

●Used Kimchi (IBM tool) KVM and LVM to accomplish the above

●Ported all modules in use from Puppet-Enterprise 3.7 to Puppet-Enterprise 2015-3.1

●Deployed new puppet modules as required

●Build in house repo for RedHat deploy and update

●Wrote kickstarts, tested, and deployed them into a production environment

Assigned to Box

Security process Project Manager

●Worked with Box security team to build out a trackable process for onboarding of new users into over 60 areas/products used internally by box

●Worked with Okta and SAML

●Created and used a Kanban style tracking, in an Agile environment

●Reported progress and suggestions, to management as needed

●Dropped the process backlog from over 60 tickets down to less than 10 prior to my contract ending

Assigned to Ericsson Inc.

Senior Linux/Unix Admin Hub Operations and TE (Test Engineering)

●Took over monitoring in both HUB and TE environments and turned them from a non-working product, into a successful, working tool

●Worked on a Build and Stability project I interfaced daily with a team of 8 in an agile environment. Deployed Blade chassis and servers into an InfiniBand network (first time at Ericsson San Jose.)

●Provided support to Database and Networking teams on a day-to-day basis in Linux/Unix

●Worked on furthering my knowledge with classes in Puppet, Salt, Chef and OpenStack

●Built kickstart configurations for use in multiple environments

Additional Information:

U.S. Army Signal Corp, Various 1986 to 1993

Division NCOIC

Educational Background:

US Army Signal Electronics School, Ft Gordon GA 1986

Received equivalent of an AS in Electronics

Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland OH

Continuing Education

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