Robert Jackson, Developer in Wylie, TX, United States
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Robert Jackson

Verified Expert  in Engineering

Site Reliability Engineer and Developer

Location
Wylie, TX, United States
Toptal Member Since
July 30, 2020

Robert is a principal site reliability engineer at a Fortune 500 company where he's worked with several different development teams (in various stages of DevOps adoption and transformation) to maintain system uptime for a myriad of active web applications. In Robert's past, he's worked on applications ranging from security SaaS products to banking websites and even a top-rated meditation app valued at over $1 billion.

BashAmazon Web Services (AWS)Amazon S3 (AWS S3)Amazon EC2AWS IAMAWS CLIAmazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR)Cloud ArchitectureAmazon CloudFront CDNPythonJiraAutomationKubernetesTerraformAWS CloudFormation

Portfolio

Amazonian Relics LLC
Terragrunt, Packer, Ansible, Python, Bash, Helm, Kubernetes, Terraform...
Dell
Amazon Web Services (AWS), AWS CloudFormation, Packer, Terraform, Helm...
Alkami
TeamCity, Windows PowerShell, Ansible, Infrastructure as Code (IaC)...

Experience

Bash - 10 yearsPython - 7 yearsAmazon Web Services (AWS) - 7 yearsKubernetes - 5 yearsTerraform - 5 yearsAnsible - 5 yearsHelm - 3 yearsHelmfile - 3 years

Availability

Full-time

Preferred Environment

Amazon Web Services (AWS), GitLab, Packer, Ansible, Bash, Python, AWS CloudFormation, Terraform, Helm, Kubernetes

The most amazing...

...team that I've worked with is a team that embraced using cloud native technologies, and reaped the benefits of the associated power and flexibility afforded.

Work Experience

Founder

2018 - PRESENT
Amazonian Relics LLC
  • Managed the infrastructure for a $1 billion meditation app with an emphasis on zero downtime for deployments.
  • Provisioned new tools for data engineers to ingest and process data (Apache Airflow, Apache NiFi, Jupyter Notebooks, and Sagemaker).
  • Wrote and managed custom Helm charts and Terraform modules to help businesses meet the team's desired goals.
  • Wrote and maintained OSS tooling along with maintaining OSS containers for several OSS tools like CFN lint, Ansible, PgBouncer, AWS CLI, and others.
Technologies: Terragrunt, Packer, Ansible, Python, Bash, Helm, Kubernetes, Terraform, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), Cloud Architecture, Cost Control, AWS Cloud Architecture, Networking, Amazon CloudFront CDN

Principal Site Reliability Engineer

2018 - PRESENT
Dell
  • Created CI and CD processes from the ground up for the Dell Data Security platform as well as the Dell Insights product.
  • Helped teams transition away from waterfall deployment patterns.
  • Transitioned a manually provisioned infrastructure to CloudFormation and then later to Terraform.
  • Created CI jobs for microservices, web UIs, and FaaS for supported applications.
  • Migrated the developer build from their workstations to bamboo. Version controlled bamboo jobs with Bamboo Specs and eventually replaced Bamboo with Jenkins. Ultimately jobs are at this time version-controlled via Jenkins shared libraries.
  • Worked with several teams to migrate their legacy cloud applications to Kubernetes followed with a transition to another cloud.
Technologies: Amazon Web Services (AWS), AWS CloudFormation, Packer, Terraform, Helm, Kubernetes, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), Cloud Architecture, Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), Cost Control, AWS Cloud Architecture, Networking, Amazon CloudFront CDN

Site Reliability Engineer

2017 - 2018
Alkami
  • Managed the cloud infrastructure for Alkami's banking platforms.
  • Transitioned the banking software's installation process away from Google Spreadsheets and into version-controlled ansible configurations which could be used to create AMIs via packer.
  • Transitioned the infrastructure from a statically defined number of servers to a horizontally scaling architecture.
Technologies: TeamCity, Windows PowerShell, Ansible, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), Cloud Architecture, AWS Cloud Architecture, Networking, Amazon CloudFront CDN, Cloudflare

Site Reliability Engineer

2015 - 2017
FireHost | Armor
  • Migrated the Armor.com website from the Armor cloud to AWS in support of the Armor Anywhere product's launch.
  • Migrated manually provisioned resources to Terraform managed resources.
  • Took an active role mentoring junior SREs on tooling that our stack consisted of.
Technologies: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Ansible, Terraform, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), Cloud Architecture, Cost Control, AWS Cloud Architecture, Networking, Amazon CloudFront CDN, Cloudflare

Version Utils

https://gitlab.com/aztek-io/utils/python-version-utils
This project creates human-readable semantic versions based on their Git history. This is intended to be used as part of a CI pipeline to create a Git tag based on the associated commit's message and branch name.

Minecraft Container

https://gitlab.com/aztek-io/oss/containers/minecraft
This is a dynamic and slim container that pulls down application binaries during startup based on an environment variable. (So when a new version of Minecraft is released, no new container is needed).

EKS Terraform Module

https://gitlab.com/aztek-io/iac/modules/eks
A Terraform module that I use to stand up my EKS clusters. In this module, there are a few Helm charts that are needed for my environment (Cluster Autoscaler, external DNS, Nginx ingress, metrics server, and so on).

Minecraft Helm Chart

https://gitlab.com/aztek-io/helm/minecraft
This is a custom little Helm chart that I wrote to deploy Minecraft in my Kubernetes cluster. This includes some logic for a PVC, custom environment variables, and a deployment among other supporting Kubernetes resources. The documentation includes a Helmfile example.

Generic Helm Chart

This is a generic Helm chart that I use for my startup's microservices. A Helmfile example is documented in the README file. Checkout out the associated CI pipeline for this project to get an example of how I define and use CI templates.

Languages

Bash, Python

Tools

Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR), AWS IAM, AWS CLI, Terraform, Helm, AWS CloudFormation, Amazon EBS, Jira, AWS SDK, Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), Amazon EKS, Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon CloudFront CDN, Ansible, Packer, Jenkins, GitLab, TeamCity, Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), VMware vSphere, *nux Shells, Git

Platforms

Amazon EC2, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Kubernetes, Docker, Google Cloud Platform (GCP)

Storage

Amazon S3 (AWS S3), Redshift, Amazon EFS, Amazon DynamoDB, Datadog

Other

Infrastructure as Code (IaC), Helmfile, Cloud Architecture, Cost Control, AWS Cloud Architecture, Networking, Consul, Cloudflare

Paradigms

Automation

Frameworks

Windows PowerShell

Libraries/APIs

Terragrunt

JUNE 2020 - JUNE 2023

Certified Kubernetes Administrator

Cloud Native Computing Foundation

JANUARY 2019 - JANUARY 2022

AWS Certified Solutions Architect — Professional

Amazon Web Services

OCTOBER 2018 - OCTOBER 2021

AWS Certified DevOps Engineer Professional

AWS

MARCH 2017 - OCTOBER 2021

AWS Certified SysOps Administrator — Associate

Amazon Web Services

MARCH 2017 - JANUARY 2022

AWS Certified Solutions Architect — Associate

Amazon Web Services

MARCH 2017 - OCTOBER 2020

AWS Certified Developer Associate

AWS