Alexander is available for hire

Alexander Avanesov

Verified Expert in Engineering

System Administration Developer

Limassol, Cyprus

Toptal member since October 11, 2019

Expertise

System Administration Linux DNS System Security Cloudflare Windows Development Nginx Jenkins DevOps Ansible

Bio

Alexander has over 20 years of IT experience. He designs and delivers powerful CI/CD architecture, complex monitoring systems, and Cloud and in-house solutions. His expertise lies in DevOps, system administration, networking, automation, troubleshooting, and monitoring.

Portfolio

Spotware Systems, Ltd.

Amazon Web Services (AWS), Ansible, Perl, Bash, Jenkins, VMware, PostgreSQL...

PrimeTel PLC

Bash, Perl, Zenoss, Linux, Juniper, Cisco

Experience

System Administration - 20 years
Bash Script - 15 years
Linux - 15 years
Jenkins - 4 years
DevOps - 4 years
Ansible - 2 years
Python - 1 year

Availability

Part-time

Preferred Environment

Amazon Web Services (AWS), Linux, Continuous Delivery (CD), Continuous Integration (CI), Jenkins, Ansible, DevOps, PostgreSQL, Kubernetes, CI/CD Pipelines, Monitoring, Docker, Amazon Route 53, Cloudflare, CORS, HTML, Amazon EC2

The most amazing...

...out-of-the-box crypto exchange hosting solution I've designed included hardware provisioning, deployment, and management.

Work Experience

Head of IT, System Administrator, DevOps Specialist

2011 - PRESENT

Spotware Systems, Ltd.

Created a database back-up and restore procedure.
Developed my own content delivery network (CDN) based on GeoIP DNS.
Designed a complex monitoring system based on Zenoss Core.
Created a deployment procedure based on Jenkins and Ansible.
Developed VMware-based virtual machine provisioning using Ansible.
Maintained and supported the multi-site network infrastructure based on Cisco and Palo-Alto equipment.
Maintenance of the corporate webservers running on nginx/apache/php.

Technologies: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Ansible, Perl, Bash, Jenkins, VMware, PostgreSQL, Kubernetes, Monitoring, Docker, Amazon Route 53, Amazon S3 (AWS S3), Cloudflare

Senior System Administrator, NOC Manager

2002 - 2011

PrimeTel PLC

Designed and supported a metropolitan wide-area network based on Cisco equipment.
Troubleshooted complex network problems.
Created a monitoring system of more than 30,000 items.
Created, trained, and led a 24-hour network operation center team.
Developed the automatic provisioning of network equipment using Perl.

Technologies: Bash, Perl, Zenoss, Linux, Juniper, Cisco

Experience

Geo-based Content Delivery Network

Due to the inability to use public CDNs, I developed and built my own CDN based on Nginx and geo-location DNS. The CDN consisted of several locations; each of which had multiple redundant servers.

Enterprise-level Monitoring System

This system was based on Zenoss, which was extended by several additional modules. The significant advantage of this monitoring model is that it does not require services definition. It discovers and starts monitoring of the services itself according to the abstract model defined. I wrote several additional modules to monitor our Cloud solutions.

VMware Provisioning and Scaling

I developed the full automation of the provisioning of virtual machines in a VMware cluster using Ansible. Integration with real-time monitoring was used for the live scaling of VM resources.

Telegram Integration

In our company, we used Telegram messenger. Telegram notifications were implemented for various reasons, such as the monitoring of alerts and business cases.

Route53-based DNS solution

Created an Amazon Route53-based solution to point clients to the nearest healthy and less loaded service. The solution uses Amazon health checks and complex geographic-based resolution with multiple failovers.

AWS Remote Nodes

Connected AWS EC2 nodes to the corporate network using site-to-site VPN and IPSec tunnels to the customer gateway. To provide reliability, dynamic routing was implemented. The nodes were successfully used as remote build agents connected to corporate CI/CD infrastructure.

Remote Work Infrastructure

Switched the office to remote work using several datacenters, cloud infrastructure, and VPN access to the workplaces. The VPN was built using Palo-Alto solutions and successfully handled hundreds of remote employees with zero transition time switching from the office to remote work.

Education

1988 - 1993

Master's Degree in Computer Engineering

Ryazan Radiotechnical University - Ryazan, Russia

Skills

Tools

Tcpdump, NGINX, Ansible, Jenkins, Git, Zenoss, Subversion (SVN), Graylog, Vultr, VPN, Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), RabbitMQ, VMware, YouTrack, Nagios, OpenVPN, Vim Text Editor, Mailchimp

Platforms

Linux, Amazon EC2, Windows, Windows Server, Linode, DigitalOcean, Linux CentOS 7, Mandrill, Ubuntu, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Kubernetes, Docker

Languages

Bash Script, Sed, AWK, Bash, Perl, Python, SQL, HTML

Paradigms

DevOps, Continuous Delivery (CD), Continuous Integration (CI)

Storage

InfluxDB, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Amazon S3 (AWS S3), Alibaba Cloud, MongoDB, Azure Active Directory, Redis Cache, Redis, JSON

Other

Networks, Troubleshooting, System Administration, SSL Certificates, DNS Servers, DNS Configuration, Domain Name System (DNS), Email, VMware ESXi, DNS, Firewalls, Amazon Route 53, Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), Monitoring, Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), Open Shortest Path First (OSPF), IPsec, Grep, Security, IT Security, Palo Alto Networks, IT Administration, IT Networking, DMARC, Spam Filtering, SparkPost, Gmail, DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM), Cloudflare, Juniper, Cisco, SANs, Active Directory Federation, WebSockets, Group Policy, CI/CD Pipelines, CORS, IP Routing, Networking

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