Cloud Services

Cloud Services

Discovery

• A “paid” service that uses third party tools to blueprint an existing  environment (physical/virtual) with speed and accuracy
• Captures an accurate profile of an existing environment
• Necessary pre-requisite for cloud migrations

Lift & Shift Migration

• In a ‘Lift-and-Shift’, the emphasis is on migration speed (and cost).
• Systems are moved from their current location (e.g., a hosting provider or internal data center) and are moved to a cloud provider with little or no change to the architecture or configuration.
• Because energy isn’t spent rethinking the architecture, the time required to make a move it typically very quick.
• Applications may not be leveraging the elastic properties of the cloud like auto-scaling. In Lift-and-Shift the cloud is treated as an on-demand, pay-per-use hosting environment.

Lift & Refit Migration

Applications are redeployed onto a cloud with a moderate number of changes that allow them to take advantage of many of the popular cloud capabilities such as:

• Auto-healing & recovery
• Data backup & restore
• Auto-scaling (up/down) based on current or predicted usage
• Orchestrated provisioning
• Monitoring & alerting
• In a Lift-and-Refit, there are typically no code changes made to the system.
• The refitting occurs outside of the code by repackaging the software and giving the cloud environment enough information about the software to automate common operational activities, leading to reduced maintenance.

Cloud Modernization

Applications are redesigned from the ground-up with the assumption they will be deployed in a cloud environment.

Common changes made in a re-engineering effort include:

• Moving from a stateful to stateless service design
• Reducing storage costs by using scale-out storage strategies
• Sun-setting fixed networking approaches in favor of software defined networking (SDN)
• Removing expensive commercial software licenses in favor of open cloud friendly licenses like open source
• Switching from disk intensive designs to large memory footprints

Reengineering applications for a native cloud environment provide the greatest degree of flexibility however are also the most costly in the short term.

Over time, the new app may provide enough benefits related to reduced administrative costs, reduced computing charges or other cost recovery vehicles to warrant an over-haul

Cloud Brokerage

• A cloud services brokerage (CSB) plays an intermediary
• role in cloud computing. CSBs make it easier for organizations to consume and maintain cloud services, particularly when they span multiple providers.
• A cloud broker enhances a given service by improving some specific capability and provides the value-added service to cloud consumers
• A cloud broker combines and integrates multiple services into one or more new services
• Service arbitrage is similar to service aggregation, with the difference in that the services being aggregated aren’t fixed. Service arbitrage allows flexible and opportunistic choices for the broker

Accomplishments

Global Leader in Alternative Investments

• Kong Enterprise on ECS/Fargate – Lead an effort to deploy multi-region, highly available Kong Enterprise implementation on ECS/Fargate to demonstrate how the Kong Gateway can be deployed on ECS/Fargate to provide a highly secure, performant, reverse proxy caching ingress to mission critical backend APIs.
• Custom Kong Plugins – Designed, developed and deployed multiple python based and LUA based Kong Plugins in support of needs special to specific business units as well as internal IT orgs.
• Kong Konnect Observability Framework - Assisted in the architecture and automated deployment of a Kong Gateway metrics observability platform based on Grafana and Prometheus.
• Automated Pipeline Helpers – Extensive development of boto3 lambdas to support individual services required during the stand up and tear-down of Git-Hash based development environments.
• Hash Based Deployments – Architected, developed and deployed a git hash-based deployment mechanism that enables the customer to automatically and uniquely deploy serverless environments through pull-requests and/or push-button.
• Serverless – Extensive use of AWS serverless technologies as well as the “serverless frameworks” to provide highly available, scalable and performant using AWS services mentioned above.
• Terraform – Responsible for design, development and deployment of golden/core Terraform modules deployed to Terraform Cloud and consumed by all business units.
• Operations as a Service – Introduced RunDeck as component to provide a “self-service”, auditable, operations solution. Allows to continuously improve operability responsiveness and efficiency through automated, self-service operations.
• Coding - Write high quality python and C# command line utilities against internal and external APIs, delivering custom tooling to our pipelines and processes.
• Diverse Support - Provide support and staff augmentation for supporting the various processes, services and engineering teams deploying and updating software throughout the organization.
• Gitlab - Created shared Gitlab CI/CD platform that enables the company to create consistent build, testing and deployment pipelines, enabling engineering to have the tooling to consistently run their software through the full software development lifecycle.
• Kubernetes - Researched and implemented kubernetes admissions controllers that enforce validity and signing of docker images before they can be deployed. This ensures all images being run within the company adhere to our strict security standards.

Dow Jones

• Multi-Cloud Lifecycle Management - A standardized “push” application deployment approach based upon blueprints that can be deployed across multiple internal & external cloud providers.
• Guaranteed Consistency through DevOps- A workflow automation process that enables us to produce constructs to meet business demands, maintain standards, and repeatedly deliver with consistency. The process enables us to provide evolving infrastructure and software as it transitions into live operations.
• Deployment Independence - Allows for flexible and opportunistic choices of cloud providers for deployment of workloads.
• Performance - Ensuring apps are highly performant and optimized for deployment in the cloud
• Governance - Implementation of financial controls, budgeting, chargebacks, logging, audit logging
• Self Service Access to Services - Provide a centralized self-service based mechanism to provision, deliver, manage and operate cloud services for internal News Corp customers

GE Digital

Our present Cloud / DevOps endeavor is with GE Digital where we are helping them with their Industrial Internet of Things, IIOT, called PREDIX which is their platform for the Industrial Internet that is powering digital industrial businesses that drive the global economy. By connecting industrial equipment, analyzing data, and delivering real-time insights, Predix-based apps are unleashing new levels of performance for a wide variety of assets. US East is providing Architecture, Systems Engineering/Programming, Project Planning and Documentation services in helping launch this dynamic industrial platform.

Raymond James

Lead the effort to develop a "DevOps Center of Competence". Instrumental in laying the foundation to provide digitally consistent infrastructure & automated app deployments

GE Capital

Fully automate the building, testing, and deployment of infrastructure and software via Chef DevOps Automation

The City of New York

Architecting and implementing continuous delivery pipelines to support workloads for internal/external and public/private cloud deployments.