Peter Palka
Verified Expert in Engineering
DevOps Engineer and Developer
Peter is a DevOps engineer who’s obsessed with finding the cheapest way possible of automating everything and running all services on the cloud. Besides his expert technical skills, he has a knack for creating an excellent working atmosphere that encourages fruitful discussions to get the solutions that solve problems the right way. A firm believer in continuous self-development, Peter also advocates for good practices to produce high-quality, modern, professional solutions, time and time again.
Portfolio
Experience
Availability
Preferred Environment
Amazon Web Services (AWS), Automation, Python, Bash, Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), Amazon EC2, AWS CloudFormation
The most amazing...
...thing was working as part of the team that developed a web app for finance analytics to process and analyze data from various stock exchanges.
Work Experience
DevOps Engineer
Capital Markets CRC, Ltd.
- Integrated Bamboo Master with AWS Spot instances and in-house developed Docker images based on Ubuntu Linux to allow smooth builds and tests of the developed code. It improved the reliability of Bamboo workflow due to better failure handling.
- Reviewed new AWS technologies review in terms of costs to check if it is worth to replace/upgrade the existing stack with freshly available solutions.
- Investigated failures and made improvements in the automation pipeline to decrease the time DevOps staff have to spend to handle incidents after hours from four hours/week to one hour/month.
- Responded to Jira tickets following strict weekly planning meeting guidelines.
- Configured Bamboo plans using Groovy-based DSL Bamboo plugin.
- Equipped Bitbucket with server-side pre-receive hooks that restricted commits on weekly planning. That allowed us to make code pushes only if the Jira ticket related to the code changes was open. Ensured the most critical tasks were prioritized.
- Ensured all work is documented with Sphinx and clearly understandable by co-workers. It increased reusability of the already developed solutions by 10% due to simple yet descriptive and pictorial specifications.
- Deployed infrastructure using CloudFormation templates or DSL Bamboo and Jenkins configuration to ease maintenance, versioning, and automatic deployment with CI/CD pipeline. Decrease infrastructure maintenance time from 20 to four hours per week.
- Migrated corporate Wordpress page from on-premise to wordpress.com managed hosting. The migration was covering content, page configuration and plugins. After migration maintenance and troubleshooting was also included.
- Analysed attack surfaces related to the production web application and tightened security on the cloud and in the application itself.
DevOps Engineer
Deloitte Digital Australia (earlier known as Strut Digital)
- Closely monitored a client's AWS infrastructure which allowed us to provide saving costs tips and improved efficiency.
- Held weekly Skype meetings which facilitated the comprehension of the client's business model and adjusted services and made suggestions accordingly to their needs.
- Engaged with the client which allowed us to improve the infrastructure and decreased the numbers of after-hours incidents from ten to one week.
- Documented existing and new solutions on Confluence pages with technical language that was easy to understand for new users.
- Tightened security on customers' clouds, running periodical audits, and provided regular updates with suggestions and best practices according to back-end safety.
Associate Consultant
TIBCO Software
- Delivered fast, scalable microservices environments with execution-ready Java virtual machines.
- Worked with the client on-site for better engagement and project understanding.
- Integrated Tibco proprietary software with the current workflow.
Software Integration Engineer
Nokia Networks
- Worked with more than 50 developers to deliver development environments and correct automation with a Jenkins pipeline.
- Cooperated with seven other software integration teams to coordinate the integration of development pipelines and also delivered components that were used to build the required version of the software.
- Separated development environments and automated them with Python virtualenv.
- Documented new solutions and updated Confluence pages to existing ones. Added tutorials to decrease the learning curve for new users.
- Audited ci/cd system and implemented security best practices.
Experience
Web Application for Finance Analytics to Process and Visualize Stock Exchange Data
As one of the 12 team members, I was responsible for delivering the build, test, and deployment pipeline based on Atlassian Bitbucket and Bamboo (one master was distributing jobs for up to 25 agents residing on Spot instances). AWS ECS served the web application and all required services. The configuration was kept as a CloudFormation stack, which also deployed all the required services, including Jenkins with a Groovy-based configuration and PostgreSQL database for Atlassian solutions (including Jira, Bamboo, and Bitbucket). I was documenting solutions with Sphinx documentation framework.
The project was consulted with and utilized by academics, both students and lecturers. It also had the further potential of being used by professional services. In its peak time, there were 25 to 50 users.
Maintaining a CI/CD Pipeline for a Radio Frequency Module in BTS Firmware
The primary one was integrating C/C++ low-level components to build firmware that needed to run custom Linux on Base Transceiver Station hardware. Using Jenkins running on Red Hat, I automated code polling from Git and SVN servers, wrote Make and CMake scripts, and executed tests on remote Windows machines. These Windows machines were equipped with in-house testing software that was directly connected to BTS hardware. I also created artifacts and informed the owner if anything went wrong during the process. I was documenting every new solution with Confluence pages and making sure it was clear and understandable to co-workers.
In a secondary role, I supported the radio frequency development team of over 50 members, chiefly dealing with pipeline maintenance, responding to developer tickets about new development/test environment creation, and working as a member of one of the seven integration teams.
Actively Contributing to an Open-source Serverless Content Management System
http://webiny.com/As a new technologies enthusiast, I spotted huge potential in this solution in terms of decreasing costs and scalability, thus, I started experimenting with it using my own AWS account.
Right now I'm actively contributing to improving the administrators' and end-users' experience. I'm answering questions in the community forum, helping to do the first deployment, and explaining how the back end works. I'm also delivering security improvements, reporting bugs, and providing ideas about how to make Webiny a high-class product.
My descriptions are equipped with screenshots and GIFs or short videos to make the problem easy to understand. I'm also getting feedback, so I can improve my documents.
I'm a recognized contributor on Webiny's GitHub repository page, Github.com/webiny/webiny-js, as Piotr Palka. The community forum is available under the link below.
Music streaming platform for fitness clubs.
http://32countfitness.com/AWS networking cost improvements optimization, security tightening, and documentation were also involved which allowed more traffic being handled by AWS internal network. The simple but descriptive documents produced at the end of the project, will allow new developers to dive into the code quickly and without employing costly and time-consuming reverse engineering.
By moving resources from fixed instances to the dynamical scale model and improving networking I was able to cut the operational costs by half when the system is not heavily utilized. The auto-scaling built on AWS Lambda and AWS ECS can process every clients' request separately which improved reliability and repetitivity of the whole process with the general benefits to both the platform owner and his customers.
Skills
Tools
Logging, AWS CloudFormation, Git, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), Bamboo, AWS IAM, Sumo Logic, TIBCO MDM, Subversion (SVN), Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), Jenkins, Bitbucket, Jira, GitHub, Amazon CloudWatch, AWS CloudTrail
Platforms
Linux, Docker, Amazon EC2, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Red Hat Linux
Languages
Bash, Python 3, Python
Paradigms
Continuous Integration (CI), Continuous Deployment, Continuous Delivery (CD), DevOps, Automation
Storage
PostgreSQL, Datadog, Azure Active Directory, Amazon S3 (AWS S3)
Other
Infrastructure as Code (IaC), Cloud Security, IT Security, Security, Identity & Access Management (IAM), Monitoring, Reporting, AWS DevOps, TIBCO BusinessWorks, TIBCO, SSH, AWS CodePipeline
Education
Master's Degree in Computer Science
Wrocław University of Science and Technology - Wrocław, Poland
Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science
Wrocław University of Science and Technology - Wrocław, Poland
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