Robert Alexander

Recent Work

Automated Deployment Pipelines I helped an eGov project deliver by improving their CI/CD pipelines. I improved automated deployments (and rollbacks) from 30 minutes to 1 minute. Multiple testing strategies allowed for safe continuous deployments. Faster testing cycle times helped the developers work more efficiently.

Site Reliability As a DevOps team lead I focused on metrics and recurring issues. Each week we identified key problems in our microservices, and used root cause analysis to gain a deeper understanding. We deployed technical and process improvements to prevent issues from happening again. As the service launched we drove down false positive alerts, fine-tuned alarms, kept availability high, and reduced on-call load by 60%.

Cloud Cost Optimizations I carefully examined the system load and previous performance metrics, and consulted with sales to generate performance and growth models. The combined model allowed us to confidently determine we were over provisioned; even considering expected growth. The service was scaled down, reducing operating costs by $8M annually, without impact to system availability or performance targets.

Web App Scaling I helped a client automate load testing and consulted on application, database, and infrastructure improvements. The client was looking to on-board a very large customer, and needed help modeling their expected load and usage patterns. In one case, the latency of an API endpoint reduced from 4 minutes to 300 milliseconds.

System Security Review While performing a security review for a client I identified a remotely exploitable vulnerability and privilege escalation path to root. I quickly alerted the client, deployed a patch, and checked for evidence of compromise. I coached them through longer term improvements and defense in depth measures.