Glenn is available for hire

Glenn Poston

Verified Expert in Engineering

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) Developer

Location

Durham, NC, United States

Toptal Member Since

April 8, 2020

Glenn is a talented professional with expertise combining development and operations stacks. His specialties include DevOps, product support, on-call, and systems reliability roles. His work has helped large companies such as IBM improve their systems, automate architecture, and significantly reduce costs. Glenn loves technology and considers himself a generalist. His passion lies in driving efficiencies that allow changes to roll from conception to customer use as quickly as possible.

Infrastructure as Code (IaC)Vagrant Amazon S3 (AWS S3)AWS IAM Amazon EBS AWS HA Amazon Web Services (AWS)Docker SaltStack Terraform Django Python Ruby Ruby on Rails (RoR)Kubernetes KVM Virtualization

Portfolio

Absolute Integrity, LLC.

Amazon Web Services (AWS), Django, Amazon Cognito, Serverless, Terraform

ClearCare

Amazon Web Services (AWS), Docker...

Genesys (Previously Interactive Intelligence)

Amazon Web Services (AWS), Jenkins, Ansible, Puppet, AWS CloudFormation

Experience

Amazon Web Services (AWS) - 9 years Infrastructure as Code (IaC) - 9 years Terraform - 6 years Continuous Integration (CI) - 6 years HIPAA Compliance - 6 years Docker - 6 years Python - 3 years Kubernetes - 1 year

Availability

Part-time

Preferred Environment

Amazon Web Services (AWS), New Relic, Secure Automated Lending Technology (SALT), Ruby on Rails (RoR), Ruby, Python, Django, Datadog, Sentry, CircleCI, Jenkins, Chef, Puppet, Terraform

The most amazing...

...technical accomplishment I've delivered is a fully automated clone of RDS that I built on EC2 with Terraform (RDS was not HIPAA compliant at the time).

Work Experience

Freelance

2019 - PRESENT

Absolute Integrity, LLC.

Introduced autoscaling in Kubernetes using Horizontal Pod Autoscaler with custom metrics.
Built infrastructure and CI pipelines for several startups using AWS ECS, AWS Fargate, AWS Cognito, AWS Beanstalk, and AWS Code Deploy.
Assisted with setting up observability/metrics and an error notification framework for a number of startups using AWS CloudWatch logs and metrics, Sentry, and Slack Integrations.
Developed a passwordless authentication and permissioning service using the Django Rest framework, Django Permissions, Django-guardian, AWS Cognito, and AWS Lambda.

Technologies: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Django, Amazon Cognito, Serverless, Terraform

Manager of Systems Reliability and DevOps

2015 - 2020

ClearCare

Ran the agile project planning and prioritization, and reported to leadership for a team of five.
Managed vendor relationships (AWS, New Relic, Datadog).
Supported infrastructure for an application with over 2000 B2B customers seeing more than 100,000 requests per minute.
Introduced 'infrastructure as code' and migrated all infrastructure to be managed by Terraform.
Took the company from seeing weekly service interruptions to 99.98% uptime.
Migrated the Django web-stack to run on Docker under AWS ECS.
Reduced infrastructure costs from $100,000/month to $50,000/month by incorporating AWS Spot instances, autoscaling, and right-sizing a number of over-provisioned instances.
Introduced HIPAA security standards and worked with external auditors to achieve HIPAA's HITRUST certification.

Technologies: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Docker, Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), Jenkins, Secure Automated Lending Technology (SALT), Terraform

DevOps Team Lead

2013 - 2020

Genesys (Previously Interactive Intelligence)

Led the infrastructure automation and CI side of the engineering department.
Supported the build-out of a greenfield project to migrate the existing primary revenue product (requiring on-site installation) to a SaaS-based platform.
Oversaw the agile project planning, prioritization, and work assignment for a team of three.

Technologies: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Jenkins, Ansible, Puppet, AWS CloudFormation

Software Engineer - Systems Engineering

2011 - 2013

iContact

Built out infrastructure management automation using Puppet.
Developed a CI workflow that moved the company from quarterly, all-hands, overnight deployments to weekly push-button deployments.
Wrote a Jira plugin that allowed developers to push a button in a Jira ticket to build out an environment and deploy code branches associated with the ticket. These environments were used for QA and would spin down when the Jira ticket was closed.

Technologies: Puppet, KVM, Jenkins, Ruby on Rails (RoR), Ruby

Software Engineer

2008 - 2011

IBM

Developed web-based tooling for internal support teams.
Assisted with the outbuilding and maintenance of data center hardware.
Led the migration of the team development environment from Windows to Linux.

Technologies: Java, Ruby on Rails (RoR), Ruby

Experience

Passwordless Authentication

Built a passwordless authentication framework for a healthcare startup using AWS Cognito, Lambda functions, Django Rest Framework, Django Permissions, and Django-Guardian. The passwordless authentication framework allowed end users to log in with their phone number and receive a temporary token via SMS they can use to authenticate. This authentication solution increased security while preventing 'forgot password' requests to support.

Autoscaling Kubernetes Pods

Built out a custom metrics pipeline using Prometheus and Horizontal Pod Autoscaler for a fintech startup. This allowed the application to automatically scale up based on request counts to handle spikes (particularly in sign-ups) while keeping the overall infrastructure costs low.

Skills

Frameworks

AWS HA, Django, Ruby on Rails (RoR)

Tools

AWS IAM, Amazon EBS, SaltStack, Terraform, Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), Vagrant, Puppet, Chef, Jenkins, CircleCI, Sentry, Amazon Cognito, AWS CloudFormation, Ansible

Paradigms

Continuous Integration (CI), HIPAA Compliance

Platforms

Docker, Amazon Web Services (AWS), New Relic, KVM, Kubernetes

Storage

Amazon S3 (AWS S3), Datadog

Other

Infrastructure as Code (IaC), Secure Automated Lending Technology (SALT), Serverless

Languages

Java, Python, Ruby

Education

2000 - 2008

Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science

North Carolina State University - Raleigh, North Carolina, USA

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