Brendan McGarry

Engineering Effectiveness: Developer Environments, Infrastructure Lifecycle

Developer Environments helps manage and iterate on the infrastructure and application developer environments with a focus on ephemerality.

• Led development of self-service platform on top of our Terraform Enterprise environment, working with cloud architects. This project enabled developers to carve out an environment for their entire application lifecycle (sandbox, development, and production) adhering to the functional domain model. Enabled Sentinel to run security policies on Terraform plan to ensure security posture before enabling deploy. The architecture included an in-house BuildKite pipeline and plugin to our in-house workflow orchestration engine. This served a platform for developers to decouple their applications and infrastructure and own their entire application stack.
• Assisted in the on-premise to Google Cloud Platform (GCP) migration. Led the migration of 2400 developer machines into the cloud utilizing a plugin for our self-service workflow orchestration engine. This plugin utilized the GCP Golang SDK for provisioning resources within our developer VPC. This provided new features for developers like persistent storage across rebuilds, two minute build/rebuild times, and lease-based infrastructure in an effort to reduce costs. Led the Terraform statefile cluster migration from on-premise to the cloud. For both migrations, setup Datadog dashboards and monitors to alert on outages and abnormal conditions.
• Drove the coverage analysis of our current orchestration engine and increased test coverage within the codebase from 2% to 15% within a quarter. This increased stability and predictability of new releases into production and paved the way for new feature development.
• Served as the technical lead and took over the in-house orchestration engine. Organized stakeholder meetings, gave video trainings on the tech stack, and mentored junior members through code reviews and setting team standards on collaboration.

Site Reliability Engineering: Private Cloud Team

Private Cloud is responsible for developing the tools, software, and platform necessary to have our on-premise infrastructure function as a private cloud.

• Led architect of the Lightweight Operating System (LWOS) project. This project offered a minimal Preboot Execution Environment (PXE) operating system image to onboard and verify new physical hosts into our datacenter. After racking and stacking a new physical server into our datacenter, the host boots into LWOS. LWOS gathers diagnostic and host information and uploads it into our asset catalog as well as setting iLO/iDRAC settings. As a result, all new physical hosts had a common configuration applied regardless of vendor type (Dell vs HP), reducing error rates across physical host provisioning.
• Led architect and developer for the storage automation project, HoneyBadger. This replaced Dell ENC ViPR as our block storage control plane solution, providing a RESTful API to abstract away our storage area network zoning and LUN provisioning. A Terraform provider was constructed to provide a desired state configuration way to interact with our block storage and integrate into our infrastructure lifecycle pipeline.
• Developed infrastructure pipeline for developers to self-service the provisioning and lifecycle management of our developer virtual machines. This pipeline provided a push button receive infrastructure flow for developers, utilizing bash and Jenkins in the backend to drive Terraform with a self-service form. This tooling inspired the design of our self-service developer portal with automation across various infrastructure services.
• Owned the infrastructure lifecycle of the developer WebPHP virtual machines. This included maintaining a support channel for developers to report issues, posting developer announcements, and monitoring the fleet of machines using Datadog dashboards/monitors. Performed routine package updates and led Jenkins updates/migrations to maintain the self-service application.

Site Reliability Engineering: Orchestration Pod

Infrastructure engineering develops automations to orchestrate the infrastructure driving our business.

• Enabled Terraform for provisioning of cloud and on-premise within the organization, including physical/builds and LUN expansions. Gave a presentation at the Hashicorp Meetup detailing the project execution. Set the standards for Golang development, such as code review process, source repository standards, and dependency management. Enabled Artifactory to serve Golang artifacts as a GOPROXY.
• Led developer for our custom Terraform providers. A Terraform provider was written for each of our on-premise services: ViPR, Foreman, Device42, and Cisco ACI. The Foreman provider and the corresponding utility library was open sourced as part of the Hashicorp Coop program and is available here: https://github.com/terraform-coop/terraform-provider-foreman
• Worked with the Linux SRE team to handle day-to-day operational requests such as credential encryption/deployment, patching software packages, participating in on-call rotations, and performing maintenance windows. Led Jenkins upgrades with no more than 5 minute downtime. Mentored junior members in performing operational tasks and trained junior members to perform Jenkins upgrades following the runbook.
• Enabled automated security scans of base virtual machine template images within GCP. Jenkins launches a new preemptible instance within our environment and initiate a Nessus security scan. On completion, the instance is tore down and the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) report is mailed to security for analysis.

Finance Engineering: Vendor Invoice Processing Core

Load invoice data received from Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), match with internal order data, and generate cost data for accounts payable (AP).

• Led the General Electric supplier onboarding project. Worked with EDI as well as AP to ensure a smooth integration, leading vendor calls and developing invoice processing rules to handle credits, deliveries, and add-on services.
• Rewrote the Transportation Management System (TMS) Dispute application such that business analysts have the ability to communicate with the carriers, generate excel reports, reprocess/ignore the invoices after the dispute, and enter cost adjustments after disputes are resolved. The front-end was redesigned to utilize mustache templating to simplify page design. In addition, I designed the table schemas in the backend, updating the middleware tier to populate data.