Glenn Poston
Verified Expert in Engineering
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) Developer
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.
Portfolio
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
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
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.
Manager of Systems Reliability and DevOps
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.
DevOps Team Lead
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.
Software Engineer - Systems Engineering
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.
Software Engineer
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.
Experience
Passwordless Authentication
Autoscaling Kubernetes Pods
Education
Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science
North Carolina State University - Raleigh, North Carolina, USA
Skills
Tools
AWS IAM, Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), SaltStack, Terraform, Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), Vagrant, Puppet, Chef, Jenkins, CircleCI, Sentry, Amazon Cognito, AWS CloudFormation, Ansible
Frameworks
AWS HA, Django, Ruby on Rails (RoR)
Paradigms
Continuous Integration (CI), HIPAA Compliance
Platforms
Docker, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Linux, New Relic, KVM, Kubernetes
Storage
Amazon S3 (AWS S3), Datadog
Languages
Java, Python, Ruby
Other
Infrastructure as Code (IaC), CI/CD Pipelines, Secure Automated Lending Technology (SALT), Serverless
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