Darek S.

Through the years I’ve tried various things, but what really awoke my passion for cloud, DevOps, and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE). SRE gives a fantastic feeling of uninterrupted flow, reduced downtime, and faster recovery after incidents. In the same way, DevOps gives the development and innovation pieces of the company that same heightened flow, and it shows on the bottom line. Where DevOps starts and SRE ends is hard to say, and I enjoy both domains. Being able to take companies on the journey where I reduce deployment times from 2-3 months to days or weeks gives a high that I love, which is why I became a consultant. It’s similarly rewarding to harden security and operational practices. Especially in the emerging field of data and AI, it’s tricky for many companies to get it right and it feels so rewarding to help them get there. My way of working is highly structural, and one of the things the teams I’ve been with have appreciated is my ability to take a relatively chaotic process, architecture, or codebase, clean it up, and enforce structure in a way that slowly promotes better collaboration between team members. I do not mind process-heavy enterprises either, as they take the structure for granted, as long as there is a way of working, I’ll adapt to that. Outside of work hours, I enjoy the local meetups, TED talks, etc., centered around tech (primarily cloud, DevOps, SRE, infrastructure, and so on) and spend time with my family. Period: June 2021 – Feb 2022 Customer: Coop and several other Umbraco customers. Task / project description: Lead QA The team worked on the migration of over 10 thousand websites from VMs to App services. I was responsible for optimizing migration processes, QA, coaching 1st level support, troubleshooting and documenting the migration. In addition, I helped several major clients by guiding their developers in preparing their websites for the migration. Process description: The consultant was responsible for/performed the following: • Optimization of migration processes • Database operations and migration of files to blob storage • Customer contact, migration mails automation • Coaching of 1st lvl support • On-call v. emergencies Result: Resolved several emergencies with migrated websites and Azure services. The migration was successful over a month before the estimated date. Period: Aug 2022 – Nov 2022 Customer: Umbraco's enterprise customers in the EU, US, and AUS Task / project description: Dev Setting up load balancing for Umbraco homepages hosted in Azure for several enterprise customers. Process description: The consultant was responsible for/performed the following: • Arm templates of Azure services described above • Setting up deployments and deployment slots • Consulting and coaching of customers/developers • Documentation of the configuration • Customer contact • On-call v. emergencies • Review of the customers' Azure infrastructure Result: I have helped several clients create load balanced websites by providing their developers with advice, documentation and reviewing their infrastructure. Period: Feb 2023 – July 2023 Customer: Umbraco's customers Task / project description: SRE Customers not on dedicated infrastructure could find their websites affected by others. I helped set up monitoring, Azure dashboards and alerts that would send notifications in Slack and inform 1st level support about websites that were using too many resources. In addition, we integrated Splunk/VictorOps based on Azure alerts, which would result in a call to the person who was on-call. Process description: The consultant was responsible for/performed the following: • Setup of Azure dashboards and alerts • Documentation of • Coaching of 1st level support • Status page communication templates • Escalation plans based on severity/ • Status page updates • On-call Result: Fewer websites were affected by others. We got a better overview of the number of websites that used more resources than expected. We also got a 24/7/365 on-call rotation. Period: Nov 2023 – May 2023 Customer: twoday RelateIT Task / project description: Azure DevOps & Infrastructure Consultant Migration of Azure DevOps to a new Azure tenant. Implementation of Azure DevOps access control through AAD security groups. Scripting of repetitive processes, so that infra and web teams could self-service create projects in 100% the same way every time. Process description: The consultant was responsible for/performed the following: • Scripting the creation of Azure DevOps projects with AAD security teams • Recreation of service connections/app registrations, and Azure key vaults • Coaching of infrastructure, security and development teams Result: The process is still ongoing, but both infrastructure, security and development teams are satisfied with a documented process that meets the requirements of all teams and does not complicate their work. Period: March 2023 – Now Customer: MWL Task / project description: SRE & DevOps Consultant Containerizing apps for small customers, helping maintain satisfactory uptime, and implementing monitoring.