Danny B, Developer in Toronto, ON, Canada
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Danny B

Verified Expert  in Engineering

Software Developer

Location
Toronto, ON, Canada
Toptal Member Since
October 16, 2018

Danny is a DevOps generalist with deep real-life experience in most major tools and frameworks in his field. His passion is tackling any unautomated or under-automated process that takes away from your team's happiness and productivity—allowing the company to focus on its core competencies—not on the infrastructure.

Portfolio

Hive Collective
Grafana, Prometheus, ELK (Elastic Stack), Jenkins, Helm, Ansible, CoreOS...
Dataquest
Amazon Web Services (AWS), Grafana, Prometheus, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)...
ThoughtLeadr
Amazon Web Services (AWS), Riak, Grafana, Prometheus, ELK (Elastic Stack)...

Availability

Part-time

Preferred Environment

Atom, Git, Ubuntu Linux

The most amazing...

...project I've worked on was dockerizing a large real-time ad bidding platform, moving it to AWS, and reducing the latency in a European and Asian expansion.

Work Experience

Founder | CTO

2015 - PRESENT
Hive Collective
  • Delivered outstanding solutions to my clients' DevOps challenges by bringing our deeply experienced infrastructure veterans to work on the problems of promising early-stage and mature teams.
  • Assembled and led what I consider to be the best team in the industry; they're ambitious yet genial, smart and ever-curious, and united by a common vision.
  • Developed a company-wide focus of always creating value using technology rather than technology for its own sake.
Technologies: Grafana, Prometheus, ELK (Elastic Stack), Jenkins, Helm, Ansible, CoreOS, Docker, Kubernetes

DevOps Lead

2018 - 2019
Dataquest
  • Introduced Terraform to the company's tech stack and migrated provisioning of all cloud resources to it.
  • Spearheaded a massive cost-cutting effort that reduced the cloud bill by 30%. Part of the savings was in consolidating AWS EKS workloads into GKE, which required extensive zero-downtime cloud migrations.
  • Implemented deep visibility into the stack via Prometheus and Grafana, including anomaly detection.
Technologies: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Grafana, Prometheus, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Helm, Terraform, Kubernetes

DevOps Lead

2015 - 2018
ThoughtLeadr
  • Containerized the entire infrastructure of this advertising platform whose combined publisher base sees over 200 million unique visitors per month in the US alone.
  • Redesigned the Jenkins-based continuous deployment system from the ground up to be able to autonomously create and destroy build pipelines and independent staging environments to match feature branches in Git.
  • Migrated all infrastructure scripts to a modular Terraform codebase targeting multiple AWS regions.
  • Put in place extensive visibility into operations, code, and key business performance indicators using the ELK stack and Prometheus and Grafana.
  • Mentored the team on the benefits and best practices of Docker and worked closely with them to automate repetitive processes and generally streamline development workflows.
Technologies: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Riak, Grafana, Prometheus, ELK (Elastic Stack), Jenkins, Terraform, Docker

DevOps Lead

2014 - 2015
Gradient Labs
  • Evolved a bleeding-edge microservices architecture to respond to the needs of the client companies of this technology and design consultancy, including managing all server infrastructure for the popular eLearning platform, Zulama.com.
  • Retained total ownership of the entire staging and production infrastructure stacks for all the clients; also migrated live servers across AWS regions and implemented a server consolidation initiative.
  • Acted as the primary technical advisor to the founder along with responsibilities far beyond DevOps including hiring development staff, managing developers on various sub-projects, Excel-cost projections, and researching and implementing various sweeping technical initiatives.
Technologies: Amazon Web Services (AWS), New Relic, ELK (Elastic Stack), CoreOS, Docker

Manager of Software Development

2006 - 2008
CAST Software
  • Oversaw and facilitated all software development activity throughout the company, managing a cross-disciplinary team of software engineers working on two software products and one software/hardware project.
  • Assigned department resources to projects, evaluated code quality, and monitored the deliverables of each team to ensure milestone and on-budget completion.
  • Worked closely with the executive team, product management, quality assurance, and the sales and marketing arms of the company to communicate and collaborate on project requirements, timelines, and resources.
  • Hired and onboarded new software developers.
  • Managed off-site/telecommuting and contract employees and mentored and supervised multiple college interns.
  • Migrated the department to new development tools, including Visual Studio 2008 and Subversion.
Technologies: Windows PowerShell, InstallShield, Microsoft Foundation Class (MFC) Library, Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC), Microsoft Visual C++

High-performance Prometheus Exporter

https://github.com/hiveco/conntrack_exporter
I'm the author of the Conntrack_exporter module for the Prometheus monitoring system. This module interfaces with the Linux kernel to allow monitoring the server's active network connections.

Cut AWS Cloud Costs by ~200%

https://i.imgur.com/CfZ0Sb6.png
After exhausting their AWS customer credits, this client requested a full audit on cloud billing and an action plan for reducing costs. I spearheaded a year-long push to drive costs down from $15,000/month to $5,000/month.

Advanced Server Monitoring and Alerting System

https://i.imgur.com/hmgTpws.png
I built a monitoring and alerting system that tracked server metrics, application KPIs, logs, and third-party data sources (CloudWatch, MySQL tables, and more) using Prometheus, Alertmanager, and Grafana. There are also email and HipChat alerts, plus a secondary mechanism to alert when the monitoring or alerting systems themselves fail.

DevOps, Continuous Deployment Process, and Security

http://zulama.com/
I managed the servers, services, deployment process, system security, and team workflow. I also designed and implemented the infrastructure and researched and advised on technical strategy.

Languages

Bash, Python, PHP, C++

Libraries/APIs

Jenkins Pipeline, Jenkins Job DSL, Microsoft Foundation Class (MFC) Library, Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC)

Tools

Helm, ELK (Elastic Stack), Packer, Logstash, Jenkins, Git, NGINX, Zabbix, Terraform, Grafana, Google Compute Engine (GCE), Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Subversion (SVN), Nagios, Puppet, Ansible, Atom, Microsoft Visual C++, InstallShield, Bazel

Paradigms

Microservices Architecture, Automation

Platforms

Docker, Kubernetes, Amazon Web Services (AWS), New Relic, CoreOS, Azure, Ubuntu, Cloud Native, Ubuntu Linux

Storage

MySQL, Distributed Databases, Elasticsearch, Riak

Other

Infrastructure Monitoring, Technology Strategy & Architecture, Prometheus, Content Delivery Networks (CDN), 12 Factor, GitFlow, IBM SoftLayer

Frameworks

Selenium, Zend Framework, Flask, Windows PowerShell

2001 - 2005

Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science

York University - Toronto, Canada

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