Charles Pickering

• Successfully delivered multiple internal and external projects on both Virtual Machines and Kubernetes environments, using tools such as Helm and Chef, and integrating Content Delivery Networks to enhance performance and scalability.
• Developed a Terraform Helm module to streamline deployment processes and simplify the onboarding of new applications, ensuring a more efficient, consistent, and pain-free experience for development teams.
• Developed business applications across multiple projects using Python and Scala to extract key metrics and statistics from various data sources, leveraging Kafka for real-time data streaming to support Data Science teams in analytics and decision-making.
• Orchestrated a seamless migration of Virtual Machines across different operating systems with zero downtime, leveraging advanced migration techniques to ensure uninterrupted service delivery and maintain business continuity without disruption.

• Deployed Rancher kubernetes within AWS using terraform modules for scalability and adaptability across multiple environments.
• Setup a Kubernetes based monitoring stack including Prometheus, Alert Manager and Grafana.
  
• CI/CD integration for various development teams using Jenkins and Azure DevOps.
• AWS Lambda Functions to support infrastructure.

• Cloud deployment using Terraform in AWS and Openstack.
• Maintaining existing cloud environments and across multiple platforms such as AWS, Openstack and VMware vCloud Director.
• Problem management and trend analysis.
• Automation scripting using Powershell and Bash.
• Documenting and designing solutions for new deployments.
• Performing updates for LAMP stack environments.
• Deploying and maintaining Windows and Linux servers across the estate.

Example Project

In this project, I designed and implemented a solution for a customer's new web application. This involved liaising with the customer and our development team to make sure the specifications and requirements for the application were met. Terraform was used to create and provision the environments for development, test, and production. This used haproxy servers that directed the incoming traffic to the IIS Web Application servers and used Redis server configured as master and slave setup with keepalived for failover, the environment also had Microsoft SQL servers in a high-availability mode. Alongside this, there was an additional LAMP stack also provisioned using terraform and was for a 3rd-party application that integrated with the new web application.

• Software Development with jQuery, PHP, json and SQL.
  
• Diagnosing and repairing software and hardware faults with customers computers.
  
• Logging faults onto the ticketing system.
• Customer Service.