Jesse Cotton | San Diego, CA | | https://jessecotton.com

Infrastructure and Configuration as Code Adoption

Role: Cloud Engineer
Technologies: Amazon Web Services (AWS), CloudFormation, Chef

Background

After a client acquired a partner platform, assist them with writing automation to manage the platform with the goals of understanding and documenting the platform operation, and enforcing generally accepted best practices and organizational standards like infrastructure and configuration as code.

Responsibilities

  • implement CloudFormation templates to provision and manage infrastructure: VPC, EC2, Route53, Elastic Beanstalk, S3, RDS, and more
  • implement Chef cookbooks to configure servers
  • update configurations as needed to adhere to best practices: network architecture, multi-AZ deployments, organization naming standards, backup schedules, etc
  • stand up new environments using new automation and perform extensive testing/validation to ensure parity with existing environments
  • help migrate from existing production environment to new managed production environment

Business Value

  • provide recommendations, training, & documentation on technologies that the team had little experience with
  • highlight bad practices & technical debt, and where time allowed fix said issues or document them for future efforts
  • help the team prepare a migration plan they were confident with, and help execute said plan without downtime or data loss