Josh Fechner
AWS Cloud Engineer
- josh@joshfechner.com
- joshfechner.com
- Minneapolis
Hands-on DevOps Engineer with over 12 years experience supporting enterprise systems and applications. Highly motivated cloud professional, formerly 5x certified, including AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional and AWS Certified DevOps Engineer - Professional. Proven ability to design, implement, and deliver cloud-based solutions with more than 9 years of experience with AWS.
Work Experience
Lead Cloud Engineer
- Worked with the CloudPlatform team to support the Cargill CloudPlatform based on AWS, AWS EKS, Docker, and Go
- Addressed cost concerns by identifying unused or over-provisioned AWS resources and removing or resizing them
- Participated in an on-call rotation
Sr. DevOps Engineer / Director of DevOps
- Greenfield development of new life insurance application including CI/CD pipelines and all infrastructure as code using Terraform
- Developed CI/CD pipelines for infrastructure and application code using GitHub Actions, Checkov, Yor, and Snyk
- Implemented Datadog for log and metric aggregation
- Built out a multi-account cloud architecture, including accounts to be used as development sandboxes
- Implemented Datadog for observability in to logs and metrics
- Built up a team of high-performing DevOps Engineers to support our development efforts
- Worked with members of the security team to address issues related to compliance (SOC2)
Sr. Platform Engineer
- Began initial PoC for greenfield development of new application
- Developed initial CI/CD pipelines for infrastructure and application code
- Integrated various code scanning tools into application CI/CD pipelines (e.g. Fortify, NexusIQ, SonarQube, etc.)
- Worked with architecture and application development teams to design solutions to fit the requirements of the business
- Migrated from Bitbucket/Bamboo to GitLab for source code and CI/CD
- Developed CDK patterns for application development teams to consume for serverless application infrastructure
- Wrote Terraform to provision an entire ingress architecture for an application behind a private API Gateway
Sr. DevOps Engineer
- Lifted and shifted 3 Wordpress sites from Liquid Web to AWS Elastic Beanstalk, CloudFront, S3, and RDS
- Participated in legacy infrastructure lift and shift from CDW managed VMWare VMs to AWS
- Participated in Agile scrum teams developing new digital engagement platform with AWS API Gateway, Lambda functions, and DynamoDB (Serverless Framework)
- Implemented and automated build pipelines with Jenkins on AWS EC2
- Implemented static, single-page web application hosting with AWS CloudFront, WAF, and S3
- Set up SumoLogic log aggregation and monitoring for and using AWS resources
- Migrated to container-based CI/CD pipeline using Atlassian Bitbucket Pipelines
- Created and updated infrastructure as code using Hashicorp Terraform
- Created Hashicorp Vault and Consul clusters for environment key/value and secret storage
- Created custom AWS Config rules using AWS Lambda functions and Python to enforce compliance rules on AWS resources
Sr. Device Cloud Engineer
- Implemented Datadog SaaS mointoring on development, test, and production systems
- Added several new XenServer nodes to an existing cluster
- Performed auditing on Bitbucket accounts
- Participated in upgrading a Cassandra ring
- Participted in a 24/7 on-call rotation
Cloud Architect
- Studied for and passed AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate and Professional exams
- Migrated Java/Tomcat microservices from large EC2 instances to Elastic Beanstalk
- Reduced the cost of a web cluster by >80% using SpotInst
- Worked with clients to define best practices for working in and moving to AWS
Sr. Systems Engineer
- Built a dashboard using Dashing framework (Ruby based) to display near realtime key server metrics from New Relic using New Relic’s API
- Wrote Ruby scripts to check for existence of Shellshock bug (CVE-2014-CVE-2014-6271, CVE-2014-6277, CVE-2014-6278, CVE-2014-7169, CVE-2014-7186, CVE-2014-7187) and fix affected servers numbering rougly 300
- Assisted in the performance testing and tuning of Adobe Connect servers to support 1000 concurrent users and 100,000 total users
- Built a system using Amazon EC2, DynamoDB, SQS, and Ruby scripts to record EC2 Auto-Scaling group scale-down events
- Built out production and performance-stage environment for Java/Tomcat re-platform project
- Collaborated with development teams to develop build and deploy process for Java/Tomcat re-platform project
- Provided monitoring, disaster recovery, and systems support
- Maintained up-to-date detailed documentation
- Assisted in ensuring 24/7 availability of services and infrastructure
- Managed and maintained all aspects of global production AWS environment with 300 million page views per month, including: EC2, RDS, ELBs, Auto-scaling groups, SES, VPCs, S3 buckets, and Route 53
Sr. Design Engineer
- Worked with multi-diciplinary teams to bring new Smart Grid products to market
- Updated existing PCB designs to meet standards, replace EOL components, save costs, and fix hardware bugs
- Performed hardware board-level and component-level troubleshooting on customer returned products
- Participated in company-wide ‘innovation blitzes’
- Documented theory of operation, hardware test procedures, and test results
- Performed standards testing on new products for certification
System Administrator III
- Worked with Java eCommerce development team to evaluate options for new, customized eCommerce platform
- Worked with various members of business leadership to identify and evaluate options for replacing legacy ERP system
- Supported existing legacy systems
- Implemented new centralized Cisco wireless network
- Implemented new Cisco firewalls to repalce several pFSense-based firewalls
- Evaluated hardware options and requrements for eCommerce and ERP development, test, and production environments
- Installed on-prem Cisco UCS Series B chassis, servers, and Fabric Interconnect with NetApp storage backend for development and test environments
- Worked with co-location facility to design and build production eCommerce and ERP platform
- Built CentOS and RHEL VMs for eCommerce environments
- Implemented monitoring dashboard for existing legacy systems
- Maintained on-prem Atlassian suite (Jira, Bamboo, Fisheye, Crucible, Crowd, Confluence)
- Implemented centralized, on-prem Git repository
- Wrote and maintained Ant build scripts for automated builds
- Implemented load balancing for existing legacy systems using Apache
Hardware QA Engineer
- Designed and performed end-to-end system testing of software, firmware, and hardware
- Implemented virtualization using existing decommissioned hardware, VMWare ESXi, and FreeNAS
- Developed lab environments for testing many hardware devices with different versions of firmware
- Troubleshooting of legacy systems including various communications systems, databases, operating systems, and hardware
Hosted Systems Engineer
- Administered 25-30 Windows 200/2003/2008 servers at managed co-lo facilities in Minnetonka, MN and Toronto, ON
- Managed proprietary Windows Services and Tomcat servers
- Managed Oracle 9i, 10g, and 11g database servers
- Applied software updates and patches
- Performed routine maintenance
- Performed troubleshooting of customer systems including hardware, software, and various communications systms, including FLEX paging over dial-up, dial-up modems, direct serial links, serial over TCP/IP, etc.
Technical Support Engineer
- Project management including planning, commissioning, and training for new customers
- Troubleshooting customer issues over the phone and in the field as necessary
- Remote support of customer Windows servers for troubleshooting and training