Achim Dan

Work Experience

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DevOps Consultant, SURF, 2023 - present

I offer infrastructure design, scaling, automation, and DevOps consulting under the Hostatic name, serving businesses of all sizes. I specialise in AWS and Terraform, assisting in architecture, automation, and scaling for both cloud and bare-metal infrastructure. I collaborate with developers on CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure-as-code, Docker containerisation, and addressing growth challenges.

Cloud Architect, 56K.Cloud, 2019 - 2021

Cloud architect and Automation specialist, dedicated to designing and deploying fully automated infrastructures utilizing a range of Cloud services, primarily AWS and Terraform. My expertise extends to assisting businesses of all sizes in architecting and scaling their Cloud infrastructure, adopting infrastructure-as-code practices, setting up CI/CD pipelines, optimizing applications for Docker containers, and deploying them on diverse container platforms such as Kubernetes and AWS ECS.

Consultant, Chief System Architect, Creative Fabrica, 2019 - present

I designed and executed Creative Fabrica's AWS infrastructure, crafting Terraform code for automated deployment. Additionally, I aided their developers in transitioning to a microservices architecture, Docker containerization, and establishing efficient local development and CI/CD pipelines with CircleCI to ensure rapid and secure deployment for each application component. 

I've set up AWS infrastructure to support AI and Machine Learning services, established big data processing pipelines to fuel these services, and configured Kubernetes and ECS clusters to host them.

Cloud Native Consultant, Container Solutions, 2018 - 2019

Collaborating with Container Solutions engineers to provide guidance and execute cloud migrations, automation, and containerization projects for clients. Our primary technologies included AWS, Kubernetes, Docker, and Terraform.

DevOps Consultant, nearForm, 2018 - 2018

Collaborating closely with nearForm's developers to design, implement, and scale cloud-based infrastructures for the company's clients. This involved deploying Node.js applications across different cloud providers like AWS, GCE, and Azure, automating cloud infrastructure with Terraform, establishing container-based CI/CD pipelines, and orchestrating application containers using ECS and Kubernetes.

DevOps Consultant, creative.ai, 2017 - 2018

I designed and executed the infrastructure for the creative.ai platform. This included establishing a user-friendly development environment with Docker containers, implementing continuous integration using Travis, NodeJS, and Docker, and deploying staging and production environments on AWS using Docker Swarm for backend hosting and CloudFront/S3 for frontend delivery. Automation via Ansible and Terraform.

DevOps Consultant, iMedicare, 2016 - 2017

Implemented monitoring tools such as Graphite, Grafana, and the Elasticsearch / Kibana / Logstash stack to gain deeper insights into their infrastructure. Optimized the load balancing and CDN setup by combining AWS ELB, S3, and Nginx. Additionally, established a development environment based on Docker and a Jenkins-driven CI pipeline.

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Senior Linux Systems Engineer, Booking.com, 2013 - 2016

Have been directly involved in growing the company's infrastructure from around a thousand servers in one datacenter to over ten thousand spread across three datacenters, all while scaling Puppet and its recipes to keep up with this growth. 

Wrote tools to help manage the multi-DC setup and failover easily using Django, Zookeeper and Redis. 

Introduced Docker, Mesos and Marathon in a single, easy to use and smooth to adopt platform. 

Helped my team move to a new paradigm in monitoring, based on Bosun, Grafana and Kibana. 

Wrote a http REST API to manage F5 load balancers using Python, Flask and Redis. 

Created an automated Wordpress deployment and hosting infrastructure backed by Puppet, Nginx and Php-fpm. 

Handled capacity testing and improved server deploy automation by tweaking the Puppet recipes.