Senior System Engineer
2014 - PRESENTCasumo Services, Ltd.- Architected, tuned, monitored, and maintained an on-premise IT infrastructure, building systems, monitoring tools and processes, re-writing open-source-based infrastructure to IaC, and scaling systems underneath the casino platform. Built and enhanced the monitoring and graphing tooling, wrote automation and testing protocols.
- Identified performance bottlenecks, researched, and implemented tooling for scaling systems (log aggregation, service discovery, graphing, and trend analysis). Optimized VM provisioning for speed, security, agility, uptime, and re-usability.
- Planned and defined strategies to cater to the requirements of Agile development teams and workflows, revolving around a continuously growing and expanding iGaming product suite. Planned projects from a technical and budgeting perspective.
- Performed SRE duties, responded to incidents and technical service requests, assisted developers, evangelized best practices, paired up on projects, and building and demoing solutions. Translated technical documents to English.
- Recruited and grew the operations team. Helped the bootstrapping of a security team. Pushed and assisted in reducing technical debt. Mentored and assisted where needed. Led the way towards a Git-based change management process.
- Consulted and assisted in the decisions and architecture for distributed office networks, database migrations, monitoring systems, log aggregation and correlation, security tooling, compliance, domain management, and deployment strategies.
- Assisted in the building of a new casino game provider platform entirely in AWS, within regulatory requirements, as well as supporting tooling, with a focus on agility, provisioning, security, and monitoring.
- Re-visited, owned, and migrated and tuned a development, delivery, and integration tooling stack composed of Jenkins, ECR, Nexus, Docker, ECS, EC2, Packer, and CloudFormation.
Technologies: VMWare, HP servers, Switches Storage, Supermicro, SaltStack, Ansible, Docker, Grafana, Graphite, Prometheus, AWS, JenkinsNetwork and IT Security Engineer
2007 - 2014Computime, Ltd.- Worked within the networks and IT security teams while at university. Grew to the level of senior engineer, and became a reference point for peers and superiors alike, regarding architecture, pre-sales, and initiating and maintaining customer relationships.
- Established as the primary contact for large customers and projects.
- Worked and specialized in enterprise and data center networks, working on switches, routers, firewalls, security products.
- Consulted with various clients, industries and sizes, performing audits and network overhaul projects, data center network setups, network perimeter re-design, and device and version upgrades.
Technologies: Juniper, Cisco, CheckPoint, Websense, VMWare
Stephen Attard
Monitoring Developer in Haz-Zebbug, Malta
Member since October 22, 2019
Stephen is passionate about technology, especially open source. He began his career as a network engineer and moved up the stack working on infrastructure, hardware, storage, and eventually towards provisioning, system administration, and automation. He currently uses mainly AWS to build code-defined, and test-driven developer tooling. Stephen is an advocate of containers, Cloud, observability, self-service platforms, and solid security.
Stephen is now available for hire
Portfolio
- Casumo Services, Ltd.VMWare, HP servers, Switches Storage, Supermicro, SaltStack, Ansible, Docker...
- Computime, Ltd.Juniper, Cisco, CheckPoint, Websense, VMWare
Experience
- SaltStack, 4 years
- Grafana, 4 years
- Ansible, 3 years
- AWS ECS, 2 years
- AWS CloudFormation, 2 years
- Packer, 1 year
Availability
Part-time
Preferred Environment
Linux, Containers, AWS, GitOps, Jenkins, IaC
The most amazing...
...observability toolkit I've built supports a gaming platform defined and deployed in code and includes metrics, logging, and an audit trail using OSS.
Employment
Experience
- Log Aggregation System (Development)
Developed a SaltStack-defined log aggregation system using Filebeat, Logstash, Elasticsearch, and Kibana.
- Graphing Stack (Development)
Built and defined a deployable, versioned, application, platform, and product-specific dashboards for use by developers and business stakeholders. Based on Graphite, Prometheus, CloudWatch, and Grafana.
- Migration from Docker to AWS ECR (Development)
Spearheaded and orchestrated a project involving the migration of over 500 container repos to a fully-managed, lifecycle, audit-trail-enabled, policy-managed, defined ECR. It supports artefacts built by over 80 developers and deployed using a variety of methods such as AWS ECS, EC2, SaltStack, Ansible, EC, Docker-compose, and Testcontainers.
Skills
Tools
Grafana, AWS CloudFormation, AWS ECR, AWS ECS, AWS ELB, SaltStack, Ansible, Elastic, GitHub, Packer, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), AWS CloudWatch, CloudFlare, Docker Compose, LogstashOther
Systems Engineering, Monitoring, Prometheus, Consul, Bash Scripting, IP Networks, DNS, Cloud, Beats, GitOps, Agile SprintsParadigms
DevOpsPlatforms
Linux, DockerStorage
AWS S3, AWS RDSLanguages
Python 3, SQL
Education
- Bachelor's degree in Telecommunications and Computer Engineering2004 - 2008University of Malta - Malta
Certifications
- AWS Certified Solutions Architect–AssociateJUNE 2019 - JUNE 2022AWS
