Michael Garfias

Contact

mike+jobs@garfias.org

Skills

Operating Systems:

Linux (various flavors), Solaris, Mac OS X, BSD

Languages:

Ruby, Python, Perl, BASH, SQL, HTML

Relevant Software:

AWS, vSphere, Puppet, Salt-Stack, Varnish, HAproxy, Nginx, MySQL, PostgreSQL, BIND, DHCP, Nagios, Graphite, StatsD, Postfix, Tomcat, Munin

Other:

Fanatical devotion to uptime, methodical troubleshooting skills

References available upon request

Employment

Automation Engineer, VMware - April 2014 to January 2016

  • Automated deployment of VMware stack including vCenter, vShield, and ESXi using proprietary orchestration platform for vCloudAir (vCA) on thousands of Virtual Machines
  • Wrote Puppet Modules and Providers to implement and configure VMware/vCA services
  • Extended Puppet and proprietary automation systems
  • Wrote Rspec/Zed functionality to verify auto-generated DNS data
  • Wrote Rspec tests to validate plugins

Ops Engineer, Fiduciary Benchmarks (contract) - April 2014 to August 2014

  • Built entire infrastructure using Salt-Stack, Vagrant, VMware Fusion, and other tools
  • Built production/testing/development environments from the same configuration source for consistency.
  • Wrote salt states to build out environments for production, test, and development
  • Custom built deployment scripts in Ruby, leveraging the Salt pillar to populate application configurations

Sr. Ops Engineer, LivingSocial - December 2012 to April 2014

  • Built site-wide caching proxy system using varnish, included writing chef recipes, stats collection/injection into graphite, and automated configuration and deployment
  • Assisted with data center migration, moving applications, services, and infrastructure
  • Managed with app deployments/configuration for Ruby on Rails apps running under unicorn
  • Wrote nagios plugins to add visibility into hardware life cycles

Ops Engineer, AppFog - October 2011 to October 2012

  • Rebuilt caching/load balancing layer reducing HTTP 5xx errors from > 10% of total traffic to < .5%
  • Migrated 20,000 customer databases from a single RDS instance to a sharded MySQL architecture with replicated binary logs
  • Acted as primary operations engineer for PHPFog product, keeping 60,000 users running
  • Built EC2/VPC configurations for AppFog product

Sr. Systems Administrator, SphereSource, Inc. - March 2006 to June 2011

  • Instrumental in $25M acquisition
  • Responsible for all production infrastructure
  • Scaled production environment to 175+ servers in three years.
  • Implemented configuration management system (Puppet) while only adding one half-time admin.
  • Implemented caching proxies that reduced webserver requirements by sevenfold, saving $.5M per year.
  • Automated package building systems and wrote code distribution scripts.
  • Wrote deployment, monitoring, polling, and miscellaneous glue scripts using both Perl and Python.

WebSphere Administrator, Honeywell (Contract) - July 2004 to November 2005
Systems Administrator, Fatcow Webhosting - July 2002 to July 2004
QA Engineer, Entercept Security Technologies - July 2001 to October 2001
QA Engineer, Consilient - October 2000 to June 2001
Senior QA Engineer, PGP - December 1999 to October 2000
IT Manager, PIA Communications - June 1999 to December 1999
Systems Administrator, Paragon Industries - March 1997 to June 1999
Network Technician, California State University Fresno - August 1995 to March 1997