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
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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
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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
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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
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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)
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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)
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Technical Director Michigan Live |
1996 Ann Arbor, MI |
• infrastructure planning, including LAN/WAN design, multi-platform file sharing, and Sun/Solaris servers
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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
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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