August 2009 – present: Systems Administrator for Imagini Ltd, London
Imagini is a dynamic startup based in Soho. The company generates profiles for users through the use of visual quizzes, working with clients including the LA Times, match.com and the Daily Mirror.
My role at Imagini is very much DevOps-oriented – as a busy startup with diverse client projects there are often multiple deploys per day, and this situation means I have to work very closely with developers both to understand what they’re proposing to push out, and to make sure they understand the possible implications of their changes on the platform.
This close working relationship has been particularly fruitful during the gradual transfer of many of Imagini’s core services from the legacy platform (a couple of racks of Linux boxes in a London datacentre) to Amazon Web Services. The back-and-forth between myself and the development team has been invaluable as we’ve iterated through various combinations of EC2 Instance Types to find the setup that best fits our requirements.
The transfer to AWS has accelerated rapidly during 2011; the setup currently includes:
A 16-node Cassandra cluster
A 6-node Hadoop cluster
Several groups of Elastic-Load-Balanced web servers
This platform is now in production use, and an all-new Quiz Engine has recently been deployed there which is performing extremely well.
Getting to grips with Cassandra has brought its own set of interesting challenges, but this is another area where I’ve worked extremely closely with the devs to get things the way we need them.
During my time at Imagini I’ve also:
Completely rewritten the legacy deployment system (in Python), and recently repurposed a lot of this code to handle AWS deploys
Introduced the MMM multi-master replication manager for MySQL on the front-end database servers
Cleaned-up and reorganised the Subversion repositories (the better to integrate with my new deploy system)
Managed a migration from Akamai EdgeControl to Amazon Cloudfront
Substantially rewritten the ‘event-tracking and processing’ system
Managed a migration from hosted Exchange email to Google Mail
August 2003 – August 2009: Systems Administrator for Rex Features Ltd, London
Rex Features is Britain’s leading independent photographic press agency and picture library. Rex supplies a daily service of news, celebrity, features, and stock photos to all national newspapers, magazines, TV, web and other media in the UK and in more than 30 countries worldwide.
My work at Rex covered the usual gamut of Sysadmin tasks, including: backup and recovery, webserver administration, DNS management, plenty of scripting (mostly in bash), patching servers, and writing and maintaining documentation. There was also some SQL Server admin, and a certain amount of desktop support – Rex is a company of ~80 employees, supported by an IT department of four. All new server hardware passed through my hands for installation and configuration.
When I joined Rex, the IT department consisted of two very busy people. The IT infrastructure had been growing rapidly, deployment had happened on a seemingly ad-hoc basis, and documentation was fairly sparse. My initial tasks included:
Installing a CVS server and gathering code and scripts into it
Rolling out the Amanda backup system and setting up a proper backup and recovery scheme
Getting the RT ticketing system up and running (we later moved to Jira)
Beginning the process of documenting everything in Twiki (we subsequently migrated to Mediawiki)
Subsequently, I was directly involved in:
Setting up the Nagios network monitoring system
Migrating the internal mail from Novell to Exchange, and later outsourcing this function to Cobweb’s hosted Exchange platform
Configuring VPNs between Rex’s headquarters and various locations – initially using isakmpd on OpenBSD, and latterly on a Watchguard Firebox
Overseeing the transfer of Rex’s image data – 5 terabytes of jpegs at the time of writing – from a cluster based on a number of FreeBSD servers to a set of Network Appliance 3050 filers
Configuring and deploying Alteon load-balancers for the Rex website, which gets ~1.5 million hits and shifts ~13 gigs of data a day
Migrating Rex’s code from CVS to Subversion
Specifying and documenting a “standard Rex server install” – except for a handful of Windows servers, the whole of Rex’s server room and colo are running FreeBSD, so the standard install is a set of common ports and a number of scripts.
Rex went on to acquire another picture agency in Los Angeles, which brought about a project to integrate their image archive into Rex’s, modifying the server software to enable them to use the Rex client application, and deploying a new set of servers to support of all of this. The final setup consisted of a redundant pair of Microsoft SQL servers, a set of NetApp filers and shelves, and a group of FreeBSD servers (running apache and mod_perl) serving up three websites and a range of internal webservices, all sitting behind a pair of Alteon
load-balancers.
April 2000 – July 2003: Systems Administrator for Empower Interactive Ltd, London
Empower Interactive was a telecoms software startup, founded in 2000 in the City of London. The company grew from an initial team of eight to a team of approximately 60 people based all over the globe.
Having joined Empower at its inception, my initial responsibilities were to design and implement the IT infrastructure necessary to support the operations of the fledgling business. This included: network planning; server acquisition and installation (various internal servers, external mail server, firewall, etc); deploying a backup and recovery scheme; managing the website; and a great deal
of user education. I also got involved in many other aspects of the business – this was a tiny startup, so I found myself doing testing, writing user manuals for Empower’s products, and even doing a little Java.
I was solely responsible for supporting this infrastructure for the first year, until the business expanded to the extent that further IT staff were required. I was asked to set up an IT department, and recruited another Sysadmin who specialised in Windows; the team
continued to expand over the following years. I gained experience with Solaris 8, HP-UX and qualified as an Oracle administrator in order to install some of Empower’s products onto carrier-grade hardware; I also assisted with deploying the hardware into telcos.
Empower unfortunately ceased trading in November 2006.
September 1996 – April 2000: Diageo PLC
I worked at Diageo in a variety of non-technical roles.
Current status: in a Yuuguu meeting with @BrandonPassion and Axel Flap (I think Brandon might be an impostor, though) 1 hour ago
Just watched Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Feels like quite a lot of the plot was left out. Think I need to read the book and watch it again. 15 hours ago
My CV
Skills
Profile
August 2009 – present: Systems Administrator for Imagini Ltd, London
Imagini is a dynamic startup based in Soho. The company generates profiles for users through the use of visual quizzes, working with clients including the LA Times, match.com and the Daily Mirror.
My role at Imagini is very much DevOps-oriented – as a busy startup with diverse client projects there are often multiple deploys per day, and this situation means I have to work very closely with developers both to understand what they’re proposing to push out, and to make sure they understand the possible implications of their changes on the platform.
This close working relationship has been particularly fruitful during the gradual transfer of many of Imagini’s core services from the legacy platform (a couple of racks of Linux boxes in a London datacentre) to Amazon Web Services. The back-and-forth between myself and the development team has been invaluable as we’ve iterated through various combinations of EC2 Instance Types to find the setup that best fits our requirements.
The transfer to AWS has accelerated rapidly during 2011; the setup currently includes:
This platform is now in production use, and an all-new Quiz Engine has recently been deployed there which is performing extremely well.
Getting to grips with Cassandra has brought its own set of interesting challenges, but this is another area where I’ve worked extremely closely with the devs to get things the way we need them.
During my time at Imagini I’ve also:
August 2003 – August 2009: Systems Administrator for Rex Features Ltd, London
Rex Features is Britain’s leading independent photographic press agency and picture library. Rex supplies a daily service of news, celebrity, features, and stock photos to all national newspapers, magazines, TV, web and other media in the UK and in more than 30 countries worldwide.
My work at Rex covered the usual gamut of Sysadmin tasks, including: backup and recovery, webserver administration, DNS management, plenty of scripting (mostly in bash), patching servers, and writing and maintaining documentation. There was also some SQL Server admin, and a certain amount of desktop support – Rex is a company of ~80 employees, supported by an IT department of four. All new server hardware passed through my hands for installation and configuration.
When I joined Rex, the IT department consisted of two very busy people. The IT infrastructure had been growing rapidly, deployment had happened on a seemingly ad-hoc basis, and documentation was fairly sparse. My initial tasks included:
Subsequently, I was directly involved in:
Rex went on to acquire another picture agency in Los Angeles, which brought about a project to integrate their image archive into Rex’s, modifying the server software to enable them to use the Rex client application, and deploying a new set of servers to support of all of this. The final setup consisted of a redundant pair of Microsoft SQL servers, a set of NetApp filers and shelves, and a group of FreeBSD servers (running apache and mod_perl) serving up three websites and a range of internal webservices, all sitting behind a pair of Alteon
load-balancers.
April 2000 – July 2003: Systems Administrator for Empower Interactive Ltd, London
Empower Interactive was a telecoms software startup, founded in 2000 in the City of London. The company grew from an initial team of eight to a team of approximately 60 people based all over the globe.
Having joined Empower at its inception, my initial responsibilities were to design and implement the IT infrastructure necessary to support the operations of the fledgling business. This included: network planning; server acquisition and installation (various internal servers, external mail server, firewall, etc); deploying a backup and recovery scheme; managing the website; and a great deal
of user education. I also got involved in many other aspects of the business – this was a tiny startup, so I found myself doing testing, writing user manuals for Empower’s products, and even doing a little Java.
I was solely responsible for supporting this infrastructure for the first year, until the business expanded to the extent that further IT staff were required. I was asked to set up an IT department, and recruited another Sysadmin who specialised in Windows; the team
continued to expand over the following years. I gained experience with Solaris 8, HP-UX and qualified as an Oracle administrator in order to install some of Empower’s products onto carrier-grade hardware; I also assisted with deploying the hardware into telcos.
Empower unfortunately ceased trading in November 2006.
September 1996 – April 2000: Diageo PLC
I worked at Diageo in a variety of non-technical roles.
Education
B.Sc. (hons) Physics & Computing, Staffordshire University.
Personal
Interests
Contact details
email:
s@m.pikesley.org
Telephone:
+44 (0) 7979 774183