SEAN SWEDA
1047 Eaton Rd, Berkley MI 48072 • 248.xxx.xxxx • sweda@ibl.org
https://www.linkedin.com/in/seansweda
OVERVIEW
Highly skilled, hands-on technical manager with demonstrable success maintaining high-availability, large-scale enterprise/cloud services. Innovative problem solver with proven leadership and mentoring abilities. Long track record of delivering substantial return on investment to employers and clients.
EXPERIENCE
Team Lead, Cloud Foundry Site Reliability Engineering VMware |
2012 - present Palo Alto, CA |
Responsibilities:
• lead a geographically distributed team of SREs for Cloud Foundry, an open-source cloud computing PaaS
• ensure health of production systems, investigate anomalous behavior and triage outages, shepherd code changes from development to production, develop and enhance automation and monitoring tools
• participate in 24x7x365 on-call rotation, serve as escalation point for unexpected operational issues
Accomplishments:
• originally joined Cloud Foundry as a Senior SRE, elevated to Team Lead within 6 months of hire
• successfully transitioned production deployment and on-call/triage responsibilities to SRE team; created documentation for SRE ramp-up and critical job functions, including prod deployment process/checklist
• managed successful delivery of new production hardware architecture; developed system validation and performance benchmarking tools; streamlined validation and deployment processes
• became highly proficient with BOSH, a VMware developed open-source cloud orchestration tool used to manage Cloud Foundry; helped develop BOSH best practices, identified bugs and suggested new features
• implemented standards for incident tracking, documentation, and post-mortems
Manager, Barracuda Network Operations Barracuda Networks |
2011 - 2012 Ann Arbor, MI |
Responsibilities:
• manage operations for Email Security Service (cloud-based spam filter, millions of messages/day)
Accomplishments:
• implemented monitoring, alerting, and code delivery mechanisms which stabilized service reliability and reduced downtime by an order of magnitude in less than 1 month after taking over ESS
• led effort to establish common Puppet infrastructure for all Barracuda cloud services
Manager, Dev/Ops University of Michigan Information Technology Central Services |
2005 – 2010 Ann Arbor, MI |
Responsibilities:
• leveraged open-source software, Linux, and commodity hardware architecture to provide horizontally scaled, high-availability infrastructure and services to campus, including:
ITCS IMAP (mail store for ~80K users, over 40TB of data, no storage quotas, IMAP/POP & webmail)
umich.edu mail routing (delivers ~10 million messages/week, LDAP routing, anti-spam/virus)
University of Michigan Online Directory (~500K object LDAP directory, Active Directory replication)
• directed software development, including both internal projects (e.g. simta, a mail transfer agent) and contributions to open-source community projects such as Cyrus IMAP and OpenLDAP
• managed systems administrators and support staff; maintained servers spread across three data facilities; total annual operating budget of nearly $1 million
• architected new services, re-architected existing services, and conceived new features and functionality
• provided technical leadership in cross-organizational projects
• served as escalation point for troubleshooting critical problems and unexpected operational issues
Accomplishments:
• documented achievement of service availability exceeding 99.99%
• developed highly effective hiring and training practices; increased skills and productivity of workforce while simultaneously reducing per-FTE salary expenditures
• produced detailed service metrics, allowing consistently accurate utilization projections; variance from norm in metrics used as an early-warning mechanism for detecting problems/changes in behavior
• developed benchmarking tools for system analysis and optimization; allowed detailed performance testing of new hardware and software configurations outside of actual production environment
• established a common monitoring and reporting framework, including the creation of templates which facilitated the rapid development and deployment of new reporting mechanisms
• maintained Linux OS templates and software/application builds utilized by multiple teams, running on hundreds of servers; established radmind (equivalent to Puppet/Chef/CFEngine) configuration management methodologies and operational best-practices adopted throughout the organization
• recognized by Grand Valley State University for excellence in supervising a student internship
Initiatives:
• led server consolidation/virtualization effort, significantly reducing hardware footprint; projected reduction of ~$150K in annual hardware replacement and power/cooling costs
• created self-service e-mail restoration tool; allowed users to recover their deleted e-mail and eliminated the need for staff intervention in virtually all cases, yielding increased user satisfaction and reduced cost
• implemented support for alternate mail domains in e-mail gateway; allowed departments to shut down their own mail gateways, gaining increased anti-spam capabilities while maintaining their ability to provision users/groups within their domain (essentially creating a cloud-based spam filtering service)
• re-architected mail gateway content scanning; added new capabilities, improved mail throughput 10x
• designed mass-mail relay and emergency notification infrastructure; cut delivery time for mass mailings from affiliated third parties by as much as 90%
• led effort to establish remote console/power-cycle and netboot capabilities in all data facilities; eliminated the need for staff to be on-site for virtually all maintenance activities
• introduced load-balancing technology for all high-utilization services
• led project to develop 64-bit Linux OS template and Xen virtualization platform
• re-architected campus-wide DHCP service and charged printing infrastructure
Software Engineer Senior University of Michigan Information Technology Central Services |
2001 – 2005 Ann Arbor, MI |
Responsibilities:
• 24x7x365 support for critical campus-wide infrastructure and services, including:
ITCS IMAP, umich.edu mail routing, UM Online Directory, DNS, DHCP, charged printing
• guided junior staff; diagnosed and resolved operational issues; authored new administration tools
• prototyped new service deployments; created and documented maintenance procedures
Accomplishments:
• key contributor to the development of radmind, an award-winning suite of internally developed system management tools (equivalent to Puppet/Chef/CFEngine); diagnosed bugs, suggested features, and established best practices for managing systems; authored and conducted radmind presentations
• created prototype radmind templates to manage Solaris OS and transitioned all production services to radmind management; substantially improved system security, reliability and operational efficiency
• leader in the development, adoption, and ongoing maintenance of homegrown Linux distribution (built entirely from source using LFS); authored document detailing project core-principles
• created prototype systems for production services running on Linux, including major service transitions for UMOD (to OpenLDAP 2.x in summer 2003) and ITCS IMAP (to Cyrus IMAP in summer 2004)
President Advantage Consulting and Technologies |
1996 – 2001 Ann Arbor, MI |
• proprietor of consulting business focused on the technology needs of small/medium sized companies
• managed employees and day-to-day operations; developed and executed strategy for business growth
• consulted on long-term technology plans, evaluated products and designed business solutions
• extensive experience leveraging open-source software and operating systems (Linux/*BSD)
• provided mission-critical IP network services/support (T1/xDSL, firewall/NAT, VPN)
Technical Director Michigan Live |
1996 Ann Arbor, MI |
• infrastructure planning, including LAN/WAN design, multi-platform file sharing, and Sun/Solaris servers
Contracted Consultant The Detroit News |
1995-1996 Detroit, MI |
• provided expertise for leveraging Linux to aid publication of online version of The Detroit News
EDUCATION
University of Michigan College of Engineering: Computer Engineering |
1989 – 1994 Ann Arbor, MI |
TECHNICAL EXPERTISE
Software (managed at scale): Cyrus IMAP (w/replication), OpenLDAP (w/replication), Puppet, BOSH, radmind, sendmail, simta (umich-developed MTA), apache, DSPAM, ISC BIND & DHCP, CUPS
(additional proficiencies): vSphere, AWS, git, Jenkins, PostgreSQL, MySQL, kerberos, OpenSSL, iptables
Operating Systems: Linux (LFS, gentoo, Ubuntu, Red Hat), Solaris, OpenBSD, NetBSD, MacOS X
Programming: C, bash, perl, python, SQL, HTML, CGI, PHP