Why?

A more detailed pitch of my services.

Dev-Ops and Infrastructure Services

As a professional systems engineer, I live and breathe Dev-Ops and infrastructure services.

Infrastructure services are often cobbled together with part homebrew and part commercial appliance solutions, and overseen by one or a handful of administrators. Due to lack of a holistic perspective on delivering a unified experience to users, and enabling a unified configuration and management interface to administrators, there is considerable friction and slippage and problems take weeks, if not months to resolve.

The Dev-Ops approach that I can deliver and establish as a workflow model for your administrators will improve the lives of everyone, both on the frontend as well as on the backend.

Upgrade of Legacy Infrastructure

Legacy Infrastructure means servers / services that were introduced years ago and then left running with minimal or no maintenance.

Why do they need to be upgraded?

• No longer support business use cases - these services were created to satisfy business use cases and workflows that existed years ago. Use cases and workflows have changed in the meantime, and the existing services no longer adequately support them - or worse, workflows contain workarounds for the legacy services, or “dirty hacks” to keep them working.
• No longer receive vendor support - Problems with the servers or services are no longer eligible for vendor support, or support is severely degraded because “this configuration / version is no longer recommended” by the vendor.
• No longer has in-house support - there is nobody in your company who can fix this service if it breaks - fixing it if it breaks may actually be impossible, because the source code or build infrastructure may no longer exist in a usable form.

Investing into upgrading legacy services offers you direct gains:

• More performance for less cost
• Significantly reduced risk of outages
• Better support of current business use cases and work flows

Central Configuration Management

Not having central configuration management means:

• Visibility into configuration of services depends on documentation effort and discipline
• Cannot easily set up additional service instances
• No tracking of configuration changes

Central configuration management gives you direct benefits for your IT infrastructure:

• Central repository location makes it easier to maintain consistent documentation and discipline
• Stateless service model: To perform system upgrades, simply create a new service instance on upgraded host and test functionality without outage risks
• Track configuration changes in source control, along with documentation
• All team members have direct access - no siloization of expertise
• Configuration management software supports configuration, e.g. with freely available recipes for common service stacks

Development and Maintenance of Infrastructure Services

You may want external help with development and maintenance of infrastructure services if…

• Users of your organization depend on “homebrew” solutions for common business tasks, causing problems with IT security, compliance, data backups, etc.
• Your IT team consists of client support (helpdesk) and administrators only
• You are paying lots of money to external service providers for basic infrastructure services that are nonetheless badly adapted to your business workflows

Custom infrastructure services give you

• More control over your IT infrastructure, with direct effects on security, compliance, and data safety
• Direct support of business workflows - improved productivity
• Services can be adapted and upgraded with changing business requirements
• Integration of services, e.g. single sign on, file sharing

Evaluation and Improvement of IT infrastructure Security

• Does your IT support and administration team have the time and expertise to keep on top of security threats and best practices?
• Do you have a complete overview over all IT services deployed and used in your company?
• Do you know who all your servers talk to?

An external evaluation of your IT security offers you

• An evaluation free from political biases and work-blindness
• Awareness of current threats and best practices
• Simple solutions to eliminate 90% of threats, and process improvements to take care of the rest
• Significant reduction in workload caused by security incidents

In-Housing of infrastructure services

• Are SaaS providers too expensive and inflexible?
• Are you finding yourself paying for a huge product but only using 10% of its features?
• Are you concerned about the data protection implications of using SaaS for infrastructure services?

In-Housing gives you

• Greater control
• Better support for your business use cases and workflows
• Your own in-house support that is attuned to business needs and can respond to changes

Open-Source and Free Software Development

I am maintainer and contributor of multiple Free Software projects. My long-standing experience maintaining code and responding to user needs and problems can help you get control of the free and open source software components of your IT or software stack.

Maintenance of Open-Source Components

If you have any custom GNU/Linux based infrastructure services, you almost certainly depend on open-source or free software components.

I can help you…

• Make sure that your use of free software components adheres properly to licensing
• Make sure you have a strategy for keeping your free software components patched and secure
• Develop and upstream changes to free software components to better support your needs

Development Contribution to Open-Source Software

If your business workflows depend significantly on some piece of open-source or free software, you may want to have someone making sure that this software sticks around, keeps being actively maintained, and maintains the features your business uses.

I can help you accomplish that by joining the development team of that project.

Management of Open-Source Software Projects

• Do you want to “give back” to the open-source / free software community by open-sourcing a component of your tech stack?
• Do you want to build a business on open-source software?

I have years of experience managing and maintaining free software projects and can do that for you.

Web Services / Web Applications / Cloud Services

Maintenance of Services in In-House Cloud / Hybrid Cloud / SaaS

Do you depend on expensive vendor support to trouble-shoot or make changes to infrastructure that you have moved to “the cloud”? Is your team lacking expertise in efficiently managing cloud services? Are you having problems with performance, load balancing, or failover?

I can help you evaluate and improve your cloud services.

Configuration Management for Web Services

Efficient and secure management of web service configuration is often a non-trivial challenge. If your web services are fragmented and hard to configure, I can help you make it easier, reducing the workload of your IT team and reducing risks from operator mistakes.

Management of In-House Cloud and Clustering

Would you like to find out what applying the principles of “the cloud”, clustering and containerization can bring to your IT infrastructure? Let me make that possible for you.

Process and Workflow Management

Is your internal helpdesk better known as “helldesk”? Have some of your departments started their own administration or even procurement efforts because going through central IT takes too long and often does not deliver? Do trouble tickets take days or weeks to resolve?

Maybe your processes and workflows need to be improved.

Helpdesk Procedures

Does your helpdesk have an internal knowledge base? Is your helpdesk informed and empowered to escalate cases to the right engineering department? Have you asked them how well this is all working out for them, and have you asked your users how happy they are with helpdesk?

If you are having doubts about any of these questions, I can help you analyze your helpdesk procedures and making sure workflows are integrated and optimised for best and quickest results.

Testing, Staging, Deployment Workflows

Your developers should be able to spin up a complete instance of your application, stack, or backend at a moment’s notice with minimal effort.

Your developers should also have an overview of the health of your codebase at their fingertips.

And when a release is ready, a single push of a button should be all it takes to start the rollout process.

If that is not possible in your organization - let me show you how to make it happen.

Infrastructure Management and Configuration Procedures

Do your HTTPS certificates expire without you knowing in advance? Are you running servers and appliances that are out of support or missing critical system patches?

Monitoring, configuration management, and automated, staged patching can take a huge mental and physical workload off of your development or infrastructure team.

Let me implement that for you.