Adam Auden

I was responsible for the operation of all production and development systems across the company. This encompassed high-availability production web clusters as well as number of other production, development and staging environments built upon the LAMP stack and Symfony PHP framework, all hosted on Amazon’s cloud computing platform.

I worked closely with the development team to help debug issues through the development process and in production and to help address system performance and problems. I managed the deployment and release management process for the development team, managing testing environments, github repositories and merging code to build releases.

I enabled the engineering team to deliver reliable applications on tight deadlines for demanding clients such as Time Fortune, Universal, Warner Brothers and a large multinational consumer goods conglomerate. I managed Moontoast’s Level 1 PCI compliance and provide advice in completing customer risk assessments, audits and contractual compliance with regards to availability, data security and privacy concerns.

Upon starting at Moontoast I worked to reduce infrastructure costs through efficiencies in our Amazon Web Services deployment, providing reporting on the spend and what areas of the business were using those resources. This lead to a 30% reduction in spending on Amazon resources. Using RightScale I built and deployed the infrastructure to support our new API platform, including scalable server arrays, monitoring and CDN integration to aid scaling of the service.

I was responsible for all aspects of IT and production systems within the company. I managed web hosting, backups, email, and DNS for hundreds of client sites and carried out all required system administration tasks. I provided technical assistance and troubleshooting to our support staff and developers for any systems, application, database, and network problems that arose.

Based on a LAMP platform running on CentOS, which I standardized to common versions and configurations, the service was hosted in both a traditional data center environment and within Amazon’s web services platform, using load balanced clusters in both environments along with MySQL replication for redundancy, scaling, and backup purposes. I deployed and maintained a Nagios monitoring environment to ensure systems availability, managed PCI compliance for Bondware and for some Bondware customers and creating policies, configurations and procedures which were in keeping with the PCI-DSS regulations regarding handling of credit card information.

In addition to my systems role, I am also involved in product development for both Bondware Web Solutions and the Renderosity Digital Marketplace team. Whilst collaborating with my colleagues to develop and test ideas for products and features for these business units I have gained insight into the decision making process involved. I have learned about selecting ideas for development and how the feature specifications are formed, acquiring a good overview of the interactions between sales, support, development, and operations within the organization.

I supported the server infrastructure behind an estate of over 30,000 entertainment and gaming machines located in pubs, casinos, bingo halls and betting shops. I built, deployed, and managed servers running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 and 4 using Red Hat Network Satellite Server and worked on migrating this infrastructure from stand-alone servers to VMWare ESX Server based instances and Dell Blade centers. I maintained Tomcat clusters and servers and ran network services including redundant SMTP (Exim), DNS (BIND) and network time (NTP) servers.

The systems were monitored using Nagios and I was responsible for overhauling the configuration of our monitoring regime and provided custom plug-ins to monitor legacy and third-party applications. I was the point of contact for my team for the change control process throughout my time at Inspired; not only carrying out approved changes but also advising on technical aspects of changes and the effects they may have on the business.

See Inspired Gaming Group for details.

I was a member of the systems team at Fotango for 3 months during the companies winding up. I supported the company's high availability web applications and the development, testing and staging environments for the development team, maintaining version control and build systems consistent with the production environments.

I was responsible for R&D of new technologies, carrying out and overseeing system administration and training for other staff on those systems. I supported a wide range of users, from admin staff to developers, supporting a network of hundreds of Linux workstations, thousands of render nodes, over 50TB of NFS storage. Operating outside of conventional hours and within tight deadlines, this position gave me experience of co-ordinating with the non-technical staff to manage service disruptions so that business operations were unaffected.

See entry for The Moving Picture Company.

Supported the operating environments of a number of large Oracle databases used by the finance and administration wings of the College. I managed a range of Sun hardware including Enterprise 3500 - 6500 and SunFire 12K and configurations based around Veritas Volume Manager and Solstice Disk Suite. This gave me experience of downtime scheduling and change management in a high availability production environment.

Responsible for network services in all Profero offices, I implemented VPNs and related infrastructure to connect satellite offices back to the UK. The company's production banner-ad servers and associated hardware also fell under my remit; this gave me experience maintaining and upgrading services in a mission critical production environment.