Duncan Thomas, Developer in Dublin, Ireland
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Duncan Thomas

Verified Expert  in Engineering

Software Developer

Location
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

Groupon International, ltd.
Amazon Web Services (AWS), Open Policy Agent (OPA), Docker, Terraform, Ansible...
HPE
PagerDuty, Prometheus, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)...
HPE
Ceph, Scalability, Continuous Integration (CI), VMware, iSCSI, Nova, Cinder...

Experience

Availability

Part-time

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

2019 - PRESENT
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.
Technologies: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Open Policy Agent (OPA), Docker, Terraform, Ansible, Go, Python, Kubernetes

SRE Engineer

2018 - 2019
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).
Technologies: PagerDuty, Prometheus, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), Web Services Description Language (WSDL), Contract Testing, System Testing, Communication, DevOps, GitOps, Git, Ansible, Python, Go, Kubernetes

Cloud Infrastructure Engineer

2017 - 2018
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.
Technologies: Ceph, Scalability, Continuous Integration (CI), VMware, iSCSI, Nova, Cinder, OpenStack, Python, Ansible

Public Cloud Block Storage Engineer

2010 - 2016
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.
Technologies: Continuous Integration (CI), Object Storage, Mentorship, Code Review, Testing, Continuous Delivery (CD), Linux, Ceph, iSCSI, Cinder, OpenStack

Openstack Cinder

http://github.com/openstack/cinder
A Python-based micro-service for provisioning and managing block storage in an Openstack cloud. I was one of the founding members of the core team and served in that capacity for several years. I contributed code, thousands of reviews, heavily influenced various core designs, and mentored many other contributors.

Languages

Python, Go, Web Services Description Language (WSDL)

Libraries/APIs

Cinder

Tools

Git, Ansible, Terraform, VMware

Paradigms

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

Platforms

Linux, OpenStack, Kubernetes, Docker, PagerDuty, Amazon Web Services (AWS)

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, Kubernetes Operators

Frameworks

Nova

Storage

Ceph, Object Storage

1998 - 2004

Master of Engineering Degree in Software Engineering

University of Wales, Aberystwyth - Wales, UK

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