Dieter Verhelst

In my role as Senior Manager, spanning 4 verticals (Agile Tools, CI/CD, Infrastructure and Containers), I was able to increase the teams focus on redesigning, rebuilding, redeploying, supporting an entire Open Source on-premise Kubernetes cluster with mixed architecture (Linux and Windows Containers). Next to driving the technical delivery/analyis/troubleshooting of the product and it's components, the majority was spent on customer/team-onboarding (including self-offered tools mentioned above) into the “Containers As A Service” offering.

By developing this in-house solution, the opportunity was ours to dogfood/expand a lot more within the larger team and had the possibility to integrate/combine all the major CI/CD/DevSecOps/Infrastructure/Services/IaC concepts into 1 unified platform. This helped steering our product-roadmap in a way we were accommodating almost all of our internal users’ requests and requirements. All clusters were deployed using Ansible and configured with GitOps methodology without exception leading to stable and scalable environments.

Extensive troubleshooting, performance testing, benchmarking, documentation and solutionizing was required getting this project to a stable and supportable product.

Being offered a management position, we were able to further drive, automate and own/consolidate in many other Agile/DevOps/CI/CD areas such as Artifactory, Wandisco, Gerrit, Jenkins, Zuul, ArgoCD, code-review ... Most of these areas became my responsibilities over time and I've organically became SRE for many different crucial applications. I now had the opportunity to apply the same high standards for Infrastructure automation, SOP/SLA/processes/support to all other services increasing my total team members to 14+ and counting.

The team was able to support, maintain, upgrade, patch, release, manage, configure all applications with a relatively small headcount in comparison with the scale at which we operated by having invested hugely into automation, support, documentation team-skill, structure and processes.

Solving complex problems, identifying (infrastructure) bottlenecks, troubleshooting on-scale networking and global deployments , architecting deployments and architecture, roadmapping , ... was a constant during my period with Western Digital.

On every occasion, these experiences were used to mentor, guide and work with all team members allowing them to grow in the difficult area of troubleshooting, problem identification, increasing skillset, … a learning opportunity. Something I was doing for 20+ years now and is not an easy trade to learn.

Onboarded Western Digital as employee to enjoy opportunity to further improve the environment supporting many important engineering teams worldwide. Implemented proper license management, applying SOP’s, defining SLA’s and documentation for all services offered ( both internal to the team and external to our customers ), the Agile teams infrastructure and the supporting team was running with high efficiency adhering to almost all SLA’s defined

Initially joined Western Digital to automate, own, lead and consolidate the entire Atlassian stack within the company used by 25k+ engineers worldwide because of automation expertise.

At first, all infrastructure was scattered and manually. Then piece-by-piece automated to perfection, security optimized, and we reached the goal of running the entire application-stack ( including mysql/postgresql clusters and haproxy loadbalancers) in true IaC – Infrastructrure As Code using Ansible, Molecule and Ansible Collections over time.

Installing, upgrading, maintaining Atlassian tools for different customers. Executing performance-audits on a variety of platforms. Complex JIRA migrations, merges, upgrades.

Migrate build-systems/infrastructure towards a containerized solution with Docker to provide reproduceable builds and releases. Deploying the entire Atlassian-stack with docker-containers in conjunction with infrastructure like automated backup and monitoring.

Every customer’s request and internal project was lead by myself from information gathering, planning, communication, to execution, documentation and end-delivery.

Technologies used: Linux, Atlassian applications, Jenkins, Git, weblogic, websphere, nginx, ansible, Docker, jmx, various enterprise databases, tomcat, ...

Introducing ansible to an existing environment whilst provisioning a new infrastructure from scratch. Providing development with a new toolset (ansible/git/vagrant)to induce an devops-mentality into new projects. Provisioning and upgrading vagrant->dev->…->prod with the same playbook. Setting up repositories, building packages for existing and new software, deploying new environments and rolling updates with ease.

Technologies used: ansible, jenkins, gitorious, vagrant, centos, redhat, hvm, kickstart, websphere, redis, logstash, elasticsearch, jira, confluence.

Completely redesign how applications are deployed. Setting up DTAP infrastructure and build-infra for compiling both java and c++ code and releasing them in a proper set up virtual environment using RPMs, jars, versioning and puppet. Migrate ant projects from CVS to maven projects on GIT. Technologies used: Jboss, Apache, Hudson/Jenkins, Ant, Puppet, CentOS, Maven and lots of other tools to achieve this goal.

Solaris 10 Remediation project. Mapping the environment of ING to the ING Security Guidelines. Analyse violations, propose fixes and follow-up

LCM – Lifecycle Management

Migrating critical business applications from Solaris 8 to Solaris 10 zones from planning to execution stage.

Help defining the Solaris Virtualization stack @ING based on Solaris 10 with Zones. Topics include: Resource Management, network setup, storage (SAN), migration procedures and documentation...

Help out in operations where needed.

Open source consultancy projects.

Maintaining / administrating the Unix environment for the customer VDAB. Design and implement a central configuration management tool (Puppet) for development and production environment. Release management. Defining and executing migration path Solaris 9 -> 10. Administer clustered Weblogic elements. Deploy/configure/migrate Solaris Zones on ZFS filesystems. Understanding of EMC2 storage technologies (DMX3/DMX4/Clariion/Celerra). Troubleshooting performance issues with ZFS+OracleDB on Solaris 10 and EMC2 storage boxes. Working with both native and branded zones. Preparing and executing Datacenter move. Implementing Unix-monitoring through Tivoli.

Creating build-infrastructure for software projects. Using tools like CruiseControl, buildbot and Ant I developed a strong knowledge about building source-code. Installing servers for distributed (cross)compiling multiple projects as well as configuring multiple cruise-control servers containing several projects in the buildcycle. Daily operations include installing/configuring/maintaining Solaris and Ubuntu servers, creating custom build scripts with Ant and Bash, setting up environment for cross-compiling C++-code. Working/debugging with Set-Top-Boxes using the MIPS(el)-architecture running Linux. Introduced “Continuous Integration” and worked with the SCRUM-methodology.

Maintaining and installing servers. All SuSE Linux servers which run the following software packages: Oracle 9i, MySQL, Jboss, Radius, … Primarily the work involved updating packages, designing the future network (MySQL cluster and replication, Innodb Hot Backup, Radius High Availability, Jboss Clustering, security, planned updates…). All other software was homemade from Punch (Java software – Jboss bundled). Implementing a full monitoring environment (hardware-, network-, service-group-, software-, OS-monitoring)

Maintaining servers, update Operating Systems. Active development of new services and implementation of new features... Various projects: anti-spam, High Availability, VmWare ESX, Solaris Security, ...

Working in team and planning new implementations as they are needed. Writing documentation and follow up.

Monitoring, configuring and troubleshooting the Aramiska Network (Both IDC equipment as remote satellite connections from customers in the field). Providing 3rd line support, monitoring and performing maintenance tasks were my main duties. Providing technical support after office hours.

This included setting up monitoring systems, servers with multiple purposes, controlling business-critical devices...

Troubleshooter for customers. Mostly I gained experience with contacting customers and solving problems.

Troubleshooting and configuring 3000 Redhat servers across Europe.

A great deal where mail-related problems (incoming and outgoing) and VPN- based problems. My knowledge grew in domain names, mail issues and IP over satellite.

Also I had the chance of experimenting on networking and specific monitoring applications (continuously experimenting and configuring with daemons, servers, applications...) mostly based on Linux and/or BSD.