I work as a full time Cloud Engineer, Linux Sysadmin and Network admin for for medium to large internet facing services.

Quick summary of my job for non-techies

A large website will run on dozens of machines (really large sites like Facebook or google run on thousands), each running special software that processes the requests you web browser sends and produces your webpage.

My job is to design, plan, build and maintain those machines and the services on them (and other services on which they depend) to ensure the site is working.

I don’t usually update the content of the sites (write the words on it) or the code (the software that is written just for the website) but I look after (just about) all the other technical stuff.

More technical explanation.

I look after the server platforms for Internet Services. Previously this involved managing physical servers and network devices in Datacenters but these days it is all in Cloud Services like Amazon Web Services (AWS).

I look after machines with with features like GSLB, load balancers, frontend servers, databases, cache servers, DR failover, firewalls, monitoring, graphs, etc

I’ve built and looked after services for email, radius, DNS for ISPs with hundreds of thousands of customers and websites serving thousands of hits per second.

I like to both “build cool stuff” and operate it.

My resume is available on request,

Stuff I’ve done at my jobs

Fun stuff I get to play with at work:

• Websites that do thousands of hits/second normally but can jump up a factor of 10 in minutes (without warning)
• GSLB load balancing & Software Load balancers
• Built a Global mini-CDN for the nzherald when the vendor quotes were too high
• Leaning Kubernetes fairly early ( version 1.5 ) and maintaining a production cluster as the technology evolved.
• Find ways to save thousands of dollars per month off AWS bills. Several times