Shiraz Hazel
Verified Expert in Engineering
Systems Engineer and Developer
Sheffield, United Kingdom
Toptal member since May 15, 2020
Shiraz is an AWS Certified Solutions Architect (Associate) and an IT consultant with over 13 years of experience in various industries that include enterprise-level ISP, a leading fintech startup, and an influential digital transformation consultancy. On whatever project Shiraz works on, he's always pursuing the best, especially in the areas of maintenance and improvement in security, performance, reliability, and resilience of online infrastructure.
Portfolio
Experience
Availability
Preferred Environment
Go, Docker, AWS CloudFormation, Terraform
The most amazing...
...thing I've built was a PCI-DSS-compliant cloud environment that connected with a finance service provider to process real-time financial data.
Work Experience
Cloud DevOps Engineer
Viewdeck Consulting
- Involved in the large cloud transformation project of the global IT estate of an educational institution for Cloud 2.0 in a hub and spoke model.
- Implemented IaaC using Terraform for all new infrastructure and includes virtual machines, key vaults, blob storages, virtual WANs, virtual hubs, VPNs, bastions.
- Implemented CI/CD pipelines using Azure DevOps and Azure Pipelines.
- Integrated an exiting enterprise service desk application with the new infrastructure using bespoke scripts (Bash and Python).
Cloud DevOps Architect
Dulmer Ltd
- Designed and implemented CI/CD pipelines using GitLab and AWS CodePipeline services.
- Containerized the applications and overhauled the deployment strategy to make use of AWS container services and CI/CD.
- Built and integrated monitoring systems to monitor the new and existing environments using cAdvisor, Prometheus and Grafana.
- Designed a logging infrastructure and implemented log aggregation and analytics using an ELK stack.
- Integrated alerting mechanisms using AWS CloudWatch and PagerDuty as main components.
- Added IaaC to the organization to move all of the cloud IT infrastructure to Terraform.
- Used CloudFormation templates for the finance department for bespoke billing report process.
- Advocated for a more serverless architecture using AWS Lambda for new microservices, and implemented a skeleton framework and documentation.
Systems Engineer
Plusnet
- Developed new features in the enterprise infrastructure for the organization to be able to comply with new Ofcom regulations.
- Played a key part from the technology side in the very large migration of a legacy billing infrastructure to a modern efficient technology framework.
- Liaised with stakeholders to draw out technical requirements.
- Implemented a phased smooth delivery of the new features to end-users.
Engineering Lead
U Account Ltd
- Resourced, led, and mentored a team of DevOps engineers, technical architects, and software developers.
- Planned, designed, and implemented a PCI-DSS-compliant infrastructure.
- Built and improved health and monitoring across the platform.
- Assessed infrastructure capacity and planned and executed scaling based on requirements.
Senior Systems Engineer
U Account Ltd
- Implemented a secure API-rich fintech service on cloud infrastructure, in Rackspace services using Go, PHP, and AWS Aurora.
- Planned and implemented a seamless migration of an active application from Rackspace to AWS infrastructure.
- Implemented resilient VPN networks in the infrastructure to improve continuous service.
Systems and Software Engineer
Plusnet
- Maintained and improved the billing system which was one of the critical parts of the organization.
- Proactively identified problematical parts of the systems and addressed them with tactical and strategic solutions.
- Created and maintained shell scripts to automate several parts of the system that included daily billing runs and automated deployments.
Qburst Technologies
Senior Engineer
- Created various Bash scripts to assist with automation of processes in large projects.
- Implemented large applications from the ground up using PHP and MySQL.
- Supported and mentored to upskill junior engineers.
Experience
Terrform Update to Include a Get-instance-type API
https://github.com/greenjambi/terraform-provider-awsThis API will be very much useful to Terraform users. As a very simple example, users can search for the instance type that is eligible for free-tier.
Education
Master's Degree in Wireless Sensors and Embedded Systems
University of Bradford - Bradford, UK
Certifications
AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate
AWS
Skills
Libraries/APIs
Node.js
Tools
Terraform, Git, ELK (Elastic Stack), Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), AWS CloudFormation, GitLab CI/CD, Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), Grafana, Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon ElastiCache, Ansible, Chef, Jenkins, Puppet, Azure DevOps Services
Languages
PHP, Bash Script, Go, Java, Python
Paradigms
DevOps, Agile, Continuous Integration (CI), Continuous Delivery (CD), DevSecOps, Azure DevOps
Platforms
Amazon Web Services (AWS), Linux, Docker, Amazon EC2, Azure, AWS Lambda, Kubernetes, Oracle
Storage
MySQL, Amazon DynamoDB, Redis
Other
Cloud Infrastructure, Cloud Migration, Elastic Load Balancers, Container Advisor (cAdvisor), Prometheus, CI/CD Pipelines, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), APIs, Cloud Monitoring, PCI DSS, Azure Resource Manager (ARM), Architecture, Linux Administration, Web Application Firewall (WAF), AWS CodePipeline, Pipelines
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