Steve Montrose

McDonald's back-end technology infrastructure comprises 47,000 franchises with no global technology standards in place, with each franchisee using a different technology stack. A new corporate technology baseline framework needed to be established and enforced globally. I was one of the cloud architects who worked with Microsoft to design an Azure Stack HCI device that was used for the POC and deployment to production. This device is now used as the baseline for McDonald's entire back-end technology platform.

I was the lead infrastructure architect for the US Airways and American Airlines merger. I transitioned US Airway legacy on-premises platform into a cloud-based Agile environment. I worked with the cross-domain architects and application development leads to build POCs, which replicated the American Airlines environment.

This facilitated a seamless transition to the future climate contribution, creating the first PaaS (Platform as a Service) solution within the airline industry. In addition, I reduced the overall migration timeline by six months.

I was one of the lead architects in successfully transforming the California Healthcare Eligibility, Enrollment, and Retention System (CalHEERS). The transformation embodied complex system migration from AS400/AZ mainframes, Oracle RAC, Windows, and Linux platforms to a cloud-based environment. Architected the POC artifacts and deployment strategies and documented post-migration best practices. The new platform is an automated system that serves as the consolidated user portal for eligibility, enrollment, and retention for the California Health Benefit Exchange, Medi-Cal, and Healthy Families. The overarching project encompassed three significant phases: architecture, development and deployment, and managed services of the new environment.

I architected an Azure platform for a customer's 3-tier in-house application that managed inventory and placed orders for pharmaceutical patients across the US. The implementation of Azure Security and Compliance Blueprint HIPAA/HITRUST health data and AI was executed via infrastructure as code (IaC). IaC was the optimal deployment method, ensuring that the new platform complies with the HIPAA regulations and compliance framework.

The solution also included the use of Azure Availability Sets and Azure Availability Zones to provide fault tolerance and resiliency. Further, I included Azure Scale-sets to enable application scalability during peak usage. Since the application would be utilized within the boundaries of the US, I architected a second Azure Region to provide additional fault tolerance whiles enabling a disaster recovery platform.
To ensure that application users would never experience application latency, I deployed Azure Front Door (AFD) as the main content delivery network (CDN) mechanism. AFD provided high performance, scalability, and a secure user experience for the content and application.