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Matthew Macdonald-Wallace
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cv.md

Matthew Macdonald-Wallace

Phone: 07950 890377

Email: matt@mockingbirdconsulting.co.uk

Twitter: @proffalken

Github: github.com/proffalken github.com/mockingbirdconsulting

Blogs: http://doics.co/

Matthew has significant experience working with some of the largest companies in the world to deliver cultural change across multi-disciplinary teams to improve the way platforms are managed, and how software is delivered.

Matthew's experience in implementing platforms, processes, and proceedures across distributed teams has enabled clients across multiple industries including Finance, Information Technology, Retail, and Health Care to gain a competitive edge over their rivals and increase efficiency whilst reducing burnout amongst staff and retaining a healthy workplace.

In the past twenty years, Matthew has worked at all levels of technical support, managed systems hosting hundreds of thousands or websites and email accounts, been responsible for PCI compliance design and implementation, and developed software for a living, before spending the past seven years working with enterprise-level organisations to improve their adoption of Agile development and operations methodologies.

Currently in the process of rolling out an Internet of Things network based on LoRaWAN technologies for his local community, Matthew is also able to bring his passion for social inclusion, cohesion and Corporate Social Responsibility to any project on which he works or manages.

Employment History

Company: Mockingbird Consulting Ltd. (February 2017 - Present, Co-Director)

Mockingbird Consulting has been set up to bring the lessons learned from 10 years of "Doing DevOps" to the IoT industry, with a particular focus on Rural IoT. Even the server that I run at home to manage much of the company uses DevOps best-practice to deploy, and I have gone into this setup in-depth at https://www.mockingbirdconsulting.co.uk/blog/2019-01-05-hashicorp-at-home/

We use Jenkins, VirtualBox, Docker, DigtalOcean, and AWS for all our infrastructure build/deployments, and are partners with Elastic.co, DataDog, and Hashicorp to ensure that we can deliver appropriate solutions for our clients.

Client: Farming Connect (as part of a consortium)

In the past 12 months we have deployed a number of LoRaWAN Gateways as part of a consortium for Farming Connect (the Welsh Assembly Government's Agricultural Technology arm). This work is now complete and I am looking for further opportunities that will take advantage of my DevOps and IoT skill-set.

The project involved configuring Multitech Conduit LoRaWAN Gateways to connect to The Things Network, configuring and registering the provided sensors, and arranging for installation of the appropriate gateway and sensor on each of the 9 pilot farms across south Wales.

Client: Brook House Farm

Deployment of an IoT-based Farm Management solution including the use of Terraform to deploy the infrastructure, Ansible and Packer to build the images used, and Jenkins to run tests against the configuration and deployment.

The platform includes custom CentOS images hardend to CIS Standards, InfluxDB and Grafana for analysis of the IoT Data, embedded linux devices to act as the LoRaWAN Gateways, and full monitoring and metrics for both the infrastructure and the embded devices.

The sensors were provided by third parties and covered soil conditions, vehicle tracking, and a weather station.

Client: FCE (Wales) Ltd

Provided a rural broadband solution based on Teltonika routers and QuWireless Directional Antenna to supply a stable, fast internet connection for a CCTV camera network.

Project included connecting the router back to a VPN for support purposes, configuring management software, and troubleshooting and local connectivity issues.

Client: Aviva Group

Technologies Used: JIRA, Bitbucket Server, AWS, Packer, Terraform, Vault, Consul, Jenkins, DataDog

General DevOps Engineering and tackling technical debt across an in-house designed PaaS running on AWS, including squid proxy resilience and verification of lambdas as they move from a single region to a global architecture.

Client: Contino.io

Technologies Used: Github, BuildKite, AWS, Packer, Terraform, Vault, Consul

Working as part of a team to drive DevOps adoption from both a cultural and technical angle within a large UK financial institution.

The role has mainly been focused around providing a "landing zone" for the customer, however it has included providing consultancy and architecture advice on monitoring, logging, dns, remote connectivity, and the cultural elements of running an Agile-focused Operations team.

Client: JoTo Systems Ltd

Created and deploy a LoRaWAN server and metrics analysis cluster enabling JoTo Systems' end-client to improve the way in which they manufacture their product.

The addition of data and the ability to turn that into information provided the end-client with improvements within two weeks of the project going live. There are more details available at https://www.mockingbirdconsulting.co.uk/case_studies/joto-systems/

Client: Aviva Insurance

Technologies Used: JIRA, Bitbucket Server, AWS, Packer, Terraform, Vault, Consul, Jenkins, DataDog

  • Working as a team lead responsible for design and implementation of Vault Enterprise cluster for secrets management including full CI/CD pipeline
  • Working as an engineer helping build and document an internal-PaaS solution running in AWS based on Vault, Consul, and other Hashicorp products
  • Providing advice and guidance on instilling a DevOps culture
  • Produced and implemented a POC for various monitoring solutions including DataDog

Client: Not disclosed

Technologies Used: Vault, Consul, Google Cloud Platform

Provided architecture and best-practice guidelines on how to design and secure a Hashicorp Vault platform including:

  • OS Hardening
  • Reference Designs
  • Integration with Consul
  • Fault Tolerance and High Availability
  • Cloud Security Best Practice
  • Policies and Proceedures surrounding sealing/unsealing Vault

Client: Intuit

Technologies Used: JIRA, Github, AWS, Ansible, Docker, Packer, Consul, Terraform, AppDynamics, Jenkins

  • Providing training and advice on instilling a DevOps culture
  • Help design and implement an immutable CI solution in AWS using AutoScalingGroups to provide build agents on demand
  • Introduce new ways of working around DevOps Cultural practices
  • Worked across multiple teams to improve collaboration and integration of project methodologies

Client: Clear Score Technology Ltd.

Technologies Used: JIRA, Github, GitLab, AWS, Ansible, Docker, Packer, Consul, Terraform, Hashicorp Vault, AppDynamics, FluentD, Telegraf, InfluxDB, Grafana

  • Helping the AWS Migration Team adopt additional Agile behavioural/cultural approaches to workload and problem solving.
  • Working with a team of engineers assiting with the migration between cloud providers and performance/security enhancements to the infrastructure.

Company: DevOpsGuys (January 2015 - February 2017)

Client: PayU

Technologies Used: Docker, Ansible, Jenkins, Rackspace Cloud, AppDynamics, Dataloop Monitoring, Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana, FreeIPA, AuditD, CentOS 7, Debian 8, OpenVPN

  • Providing Architecture, Implementation and Consultancy services to a major European payment provider to assist in the rollout of their core platform.
  • Designed and implemented a secure access solution for Developers and Operations staff using OpenVPN backed by FreeIPA Central Authentication Server and sending all actions recorded by AuditD to ELK for analysis.
  • Created a scalable Jenkins CI/CD pipeline via secure links (OpenVPN) into multiple environments and centralised logging of platform and application logs via secure links back to the ELK Cluster.
  • Advised on monitoring strategies including AppDynamics and Dataloop, including best practice for alerting on metrics and setting thresholds.

Company: DevOpsGuys

Client: Companies House

Technologies Used: Ansible, Jenkins, Terraform

  • Providing Architecture, Implementation and Consultancy services to a major government organisation to assist in the migration to AWS of their core platform.
  • Provided advice and guidance on adopting an Agile approach to software development
  • Advised on monitoring strategies, including best practice for alerting on metrics and setting thresholds.
  • Created a scalable Jenkins CI/CD pipeline

Company: DevOpsGuys

Client: Vodafone UK

Technologies Used: AWS, Jenkins, Terraform, NodeJS, IBM Bluemix, Git, Jenkins Job Builder

  • Mentoring and guidance to a number of teams teams including 3rd-party integrators on how to work in an agile, test-driven development flow across multiple locations and time-zones
  • Architecture and delivery of NodeJS CI/CD pipeline based on a simplified GitFlow process including education and mentoring of client staff on branching best practice and ccoding standards.
  • Architecture and delivery of Bluemix-based application including automation of deployment.
  • Design and transition from BlueMix to AWS after analysis of Bluemix platform

Company: DevOpsGuys

Client: Vodafone UK

Technologies Used: AWS, Jenkins, Terraform, Git, Jenkins Job Builder, Centos 6, Ansible, Selenium, Nexus

  • Introduced CI/CD/DevOps/Configuration Management to multiple business teams
  • Training on Ansible/Jenkins/Terraform
  • Regression testing reduced from 4 week manual process to 45 minute automated process
  • Conversion of Supply/Demand product from manual deploy on physical servers to automated configuration management in AWS.
  • Installation, configuration and maintenance of Atlassian stack (Crowd, JIRA, Confluence, Stash)

Company: DevOpsGuys

Client: APM Group

Technologies Used: Jenkins, Ansible, Drupal, PHP, MySQL, Apache2, Ubuntu, CentOS, SELinux

  • Transition planning for migration from Rackspace to both Azure and UKCloud (Skyscape)
  • Design and creation of secure hosting environments in multiple cloud providers
  • Design and implementation of infrastructure monitoring

Company: Green and Secure IT Limited (October 2014 - January 2015)

Client: DevOpsGuys

Technologies Used: Jenkins, Ansible, Rackspace, Git

  • Providing Systems Architecture and implementation services across multiple clients including migrations to and from Cloud Providers

Company: Hewlett Packard Cloud Services (May 2013 - October 2014)

Technologies Used: OpenStack, Python, Jenkins, Jenkins Job Builder, ELK, Icinga2, check_mk, RabbitMQ, MySQL

  • Openstack Developer focusing on Nova Compute and related technologies including hypervisor, network and block storage
  • Designed and implemented centralised logging and monitoring for HP Helion Openstack initial release
  • Created multiple pipelines to deal with code forks and package dependencies in order to allow for CI/CD into tertiary/secondary environments
  • Worked with Openstack Infrastructure Team to provide TripleO (Openstack On Openstack) for CI/CD and local developer work

Company: Hewlett Packard Cloud Services

Technologies Used: OpenStack, Python, Jenkins, Jenkins Job Builder, Chef, Icinga, Bacula

  • Designed and implemented self-configuring backup solution using Chef and Bacula across multiple physical datacentres
  • Worked on a test harness for Openstack Chef configuration roles including automated testing via icinga checks
  • Design of MCollective-based orchestration network using ActiveMQ as the broker

Company: Green and Secure IT Limited (December 2011 - May 2013)

Client: LoveFilm (Amazon Prime Movies)

Technologies Used: Puppet, CFEngine, Solr

  • Designed and implemented configuration management of Developer workstations including Linux and Apple using Puppet
  • Worked on configuration management of new servers using CFEngine

**Company: Namesco Ltd (April 2009 - December 2011) **

Technologies Used: Zeus Webserver, ZXTM (Riverbed Stingray Traffic Managers), MySQL, NetApp, Jenkins, Puppet, PHP

  • Introduced Puppet and configuration management to the organisation, reducing server build times from 8hrs to under 10 minutes
  • Responsible for PCI Compliance across the organisation including network/server security and architecture
  • Responsible for Shared Hosting Platform and associated teams running 24x7 support for over 500,000 websites and related MySQL databases and email accounts
  • Developed "Cucumber LibVirt" for Test-Driven Infrastructure Development

Conference Talks

Projects of interest

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