Duncan Thomas
Verified Expert in Engineering
Software Developer
Dublin, Ireland
Toptal member since October 28, 2020
Duncan is a senior back-end developer with experience ranging from low-level Kernel device drivers to storage stack design and development, networking, micro-services, and API creation. He was a founding member of the Openstack block storage (Cinder) project, has helped build and run some of the largest supercomputers in the world, and been a key member of the operations team of a leading commerce platform, among other jobs.
Portfolio
Experience
- Programming - 20 years
- Linux - 20 years
- Agile - 20 years
- System Design - 20 years
- Distributed Systems - 17 years
- Python - 15 years
- Cinder - 8 years
- Go - 5 years
Preferred Environment
Command-line Interface (CLI), MacOS, Linux
The most amazing...
...project I've worked on was a supercomputer modeling protein folding to develop cancer treatments.
Work Experience
Infrastructure Engineer
Groupon International, ltd.
- Led the migration of self-built Kubernetes clusters running on raw Amazon EC2 instances to manage Kubernetes on EKS. Included multiple rounds of GAP and cost analysis.
- Championed, designed, built, and led maintenance of a self-service sandbox style Kubernetes cluster for teams not prioritized for initial Kubernetes migration. This work included training material and aggressive cost control.
- Led a drive for increased code quality via automated linting on all reviews, to reduce reviewer time on issues that could be detected automatically.
- Championed massively increased user interaction and feedback loops between my infrastructure team and the teams that used our platform. This led to a steady stream of small, low cost changes improving their productivity.
SRE Engineer
HPE
- Asissted as one of two engineers tasked with building a new SRE team to handle the initial clusters on a new management system that included multiple Kubernetes clusters, hundreds of microservices, and dozens of teams pushing changes.
- Guided the definition of the rules for what made a service supportable and designed the pushback rules for teams delivering a service not up to the quality needed for a production service.
- Designed a number of dashboards giving views into the system for different external requirements (sales, cost management, infrastructure support, and service teams, to name a few).
Cloud Infrastructure Engineer
HPE
- Participated in a small team delivering the storage component of a private cloud solution based on Openstack.
- Debugged complex storage-management tooling and node use generation code.
- Maintained the primary interface between HPE Cloud and the Openstack Cinder project.
- Single-handedly developed a PoC quality demonstration system for the use of cheap, commodity hardware into horizontally scalable storage solution for VMware for a high-demand customer with a potential contract value of tens of millions.
Public Cloud Block Storage Engineer
HPE
- Co-fouonded the Openstack Cinder project, and helped shape it into a highly productive and contributer-friendly team handling thousands of contributions for dozens of companies driving continuous integration and testing practices.
- Became the first Openstack core team member at HPE and helped shape the nature and manner of HPE's Openstack contributions.
- Designed and implemented core Cinder components including back-up and advanced scheduling features.
- Became the primary external driver contributions mentor for the Cinder team.
- Assisted in the design, drive, and mentoring of the external CI integration with the Cinder upstream codebase.
- Invited to multiple international Openstack code Hackathons as a mentor and code reviewer.
Experience
Openstack Cinder
http://github.com/openstack/cinderEducation
Master of Engineering Degree in Software Engineering
University of Wales, Aberystwyth - Wales, UK
Skills
Libraries/APIs
Cinder
Tools
Git, Ansible, Terraform, VMware, Kubernetes Operators
Languages
Python, Go, Web Services Description Language (WSDL)
Paradigms
Agile, DevOps, Continuous Delivery (CD), Testing, Continuous Integration (CI)
Platforms
Linux, OpenStack, Kubernetes, Docker, PagerDuty, Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Frameworks
Nova
Storage
Ceph, Object Storage
Other
Command-line Interface (CLI), Distributed Systems, Software Development, Programming, System Design, Project Planning, Code Review, Mentorship, System Testing, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), Scalability, API Design, User Experience (UX), Versioning, Community Management, Open Policy Agent (OPA), GitOps, Communication, Contract Testing, Prometheus, iSCSI
How to Work with Toptal
Toptal matches you directly with global industry experts from our network in hours—not weeks or months.
Share your needs
Choose your talent
Start your risk-free talent trial
Top talent is in high demand.
Start hiring