James Olds

James Olds

Infrastructure Engineer

Oden Technologies

Biography

My professional career began in 2009 when I enlisted in the US Navy as an Information Systems Technician, but I have been obsessed with computers ever since the day my parents brought home a our first computer, a Tandy. I have been lucky enough to be able to work on interesting projects with really smart people, picking up network engineering early on in my career. After separating from the Navy, I became very interested in automation and software development while working on my BS in Software Development and Security. Today I leverage my experience across a diverse range of industries and technologies to automate and abstract infrastructure.

Interests

  • Kubernetes
  • Automation + Tooling
  • Meaningful Work

Education

  • BS - Software Development and Security, 2018

    University of Maryland Global Campus

Experience

 
 
 
 
 

Infrastructure Engineer

Oden Technologies

November 2021 – August 2022 Remote
  • Evaluated multiple solutions and implemented Garden.io to streamline the Kubernetes development cycle, with a goal of reducing merge conflicts and mean time to merge.
  • Wrote terraform for and maintained a large scale data analytics deployment on Google Cloud (GCP).
  • Migrated Google Cloud Monitoring dashboards to Grafana with jsonnet and terraform, greatly improving the observability and monitoring UX.
  • Configured an initial implementation of the Bazel build system to improve the Golang monorepo build and deploy process.
  • Configured Statuspage.io to provide customers with up-to-date status of Oden’s major components.
 
 
 
 
 

Sr DevOps Engineer

Ad Hoc

June 2018 – November 2021 Remote
  • Developed a browser based code evaluation environment with Golang on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) using Identity Aware Proxy (IaP) to enable engineers 1-click access to view and run candidate code reducing a major bottleneck in the recruitment pipeline.
  • Migrated Packer / Ansible and ElasticBeanstalk EC2 hosts to ECS Fargate, greatly reducing operational complexity and maintenance requirements while increasing security and deployment velocity.
  • Led the migration of Jenkins pipelines to AWS CodeBuild and Github Actions, significantly reducing the operations overhead of managing and troubleshooting self-hosted Jenkins.
  • Created and maintained all cloud infrastructure as code (IaC) with Terraform and YAML. Utilized open source Terraform modules where possible, contributing features back upstream.
  • Designed technical challenges for engineering candidates including containerizing a Python app fronted by an nginx reverse proxy with docker-compose.
 
 
 
 
 

Sr Network Administrator

Supreme Court of Oklahoma

June 2016 – June 2018 Oklahoma City
  • Designed a pipeline for network infrastructure validation using Salt to orchestrate virtual machine deployment to KVM hosts. Utilized Ubuntu MAAS for bare metal and hypervisor provisioning.
  • Wrote a web application monitoring service in Python using the Serverless Framework on AWS Lambda.
  • Developed a backup rotation service in Rust to maintain rolling backups of network devices for three months.
  • Used Microsoft TFS with git for version control and release pipelines.
  • Developed a Python library for SilverPeak’s SD-WAN API to automate and validate configuration changes across a large-scale fleet of devices.
  • Automated configuration management of Linux hosts using Terraform, Ansible, and Docker containers.
  • Created Icinga2 dashboards and alerts for key metrics like HTTP response times and application-layer monitoring of hosted web services.
 
 
 
 
 

Lead Network Engineer

CSC

October 2014 – October 2015 Manama, Bahrain
  • Automated configuration of a large-scale fleet of network devices using Python and Perl.
  • Designed custom SolarWinds compliance reports standardizing network device configuration while ensuring 100% of devices conformed to strict DoD standards.
  • Scaled VMware vSphere deployment by configuring Cisco 1000v and Nexus switches for two new hypervisors increasing compute and storage capacity by 40%.
  • Modernized network protocols by upgrading to RSTP and DMVPN increasing availability and confidentiality.
  • Optimized the layer 2 network to use jumbo frames resulting in a 10% increase in network throughput at zero additional cost.
  • Maintained an 8-node virtualized Cisco ISE deployment providing access layer security across two network enclaves for over 5000 endpoints.
  • Corrected critical security vulnerabilities by upgrading all network devices to SNMP V3 and migrating VPNs to industry standard encryption algorithms.
 
 
 
 
 

Information Systems Technician First Class

US Navy

August 2009 – October 2014 US
  • Engineered a secure remote access solution that delivered sub-second failover while reducing CapEx costs by 20% on each new site deployment.
  • Optimized TCP MSS configuration of in-line network encryption devices reducing fragmentation by 20%.
  • Led the migration to multi-area OSPF over DMVPN, securing remote site traffic while providing greater uptime for mission critical networks.
  • Upgraded from RIPv2 and static routing to EIGRP over GRE significantly reducing administrative burden.
  • Implemented a multicast solution to deliver strategic live video to key decision makers while greatly reducing the bandwidth requirements of real time video.
  • Increased Windows 7 migration speed by 50% by configuring EtherChannel trunks at deployment sites.
  • Rapidly delivered secure VoIP capabilities to 800 users using Cisco UCM.
  • Deployed and maintained Cisco ASA devices to securely extend classified networks to remote locations.
  • Mentored junior technicians leading to four CCNA certifications over the course of a year.
  • Discovered and corrected improper video teleconferencing configuration using Wireshark for packet analysis.
  • Maintained network documentation and diagrams using Microsoft Visio.

Recent Posts

Evaluating Kubernetes Development Tooling

Application development with microservices is typically a bit different and at times more complicated than more traditional monolithic architectures. When writing a feature against a single service, you may find that you depend on another running service to test API calls.
Aug 5, 2022 6 min read

Xonsh: Using a Python Shell to Manage AWS Snapshots

This sprint I have a ticket from the security team to investigate unencrypted snapshots in our AWS account and either encrypt them or delete them if no longer needed. In my initial attempt I just used the AWS web console, filtered by “Encryption: Not Encrypted” in the snapshots section, and attempted to delete that list.
Aug 13, 2020 4 min read

GNS3 VM On Hyper-V

With Windows 10 Pro, you have the option of using a Windows native hypervisor called Hyper-V. It’s included with the OS so you don’t have to pay the high price of something like VMWare Workstation while still getting great performance.
Jan 22, 2017 4 min read

Learning Systems Programming: Rust vs C (Part 1)

I’ve been wanting to learn systems programming for a long time now. After reading about Rust every-other-day on Hacker News I’ve been dying to dive into it but have found that most tutorials online get kind of tough to follow for those of us without a C/C++ background.
May 2, 2016 5 min read

Bash on Ubuntu on Windows

In the latest test build of Windows 10 (build 14316), Microsoft introduced Ubuntu userland as a windows exe. This means you can apt-get anything in ubuntu’s repositories and PPAs right from windows!
Apr 8, 2016 1 min read

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