Melanie Smith-Bell

Annapolis,MD

Summary

I am an outcome-oriented DevOps Engineer and AWS Solution Architect with over 5 years of experience in designing, implementing, and managing scalable and resilient cloud infrastructures. I possess proven expertise in automating deployment pipelines, optimizing application performance, and ensuring robust security practices. I excel in leveraging AWS services and DevOps tools to drive continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD), enhance operational efficiency, and reduce costs. I am skilled in collaborating with cross-functional teams to deliver innovative solutions that align with business objectives.

Overview

years of professional experience

Work History

AWS Sr. Cloud Engineer

Technical Resource International

07.2021 - Current

Lead automation and orchestration of cloud service offerings on AWS
Architect and support IoT devices heartbeat using IoT Core, kinesis stream, DynamoDB table, Cloud watches for monitoring, Athena to query data, and Lambda to trigger SNS Notification
Create and maintain highly scalable and fault tolerant multi-tier AWS environments spanning across multiple availability zones using Terraform and CloudFormation
Work in conjunction with multiple teams to make sure that the infrastructure and customer applications work harmoniously together
Write Terraform scripts from scratch for building Dev, Staging, Prod and DR environments
Support kinesis dashboards and applications that react to incoming data using AWS provided SDKs; and exported data from kinesis to other AWS services including EMR for analytics, S3 for storage, and Lambda for event driven actions
Provision and manage AWS infrastructure using Terraform and CloudFormation
Deploying CFTs, to manage S3, EC2, and IAM on CLI
Configured an Amazon Linux 2 instance to send log files to Amazon CloudWatch
Deployed various Java spring boot-based applications on the Kubernetes cluster hosted on the AWS Instances, managed the application performance by configuring AppDynamics
Manage SONA type nexus repositories to download the artifacts (jar, war & ear) during the build
Manage Kubernetes deployments, objects for high availability and scalability using horizontal pod scaler and resources management
Perform installation and managed Grafana to Visualize the metrics collected by Prometheus
Launch and Manage Web Applications with AWS CloudFormation and Terraform with several supporting AWS products and services, including Auto Scaling groups, EC2 instances, Elastic Load Balancing, RDS instances and more
Create Amazon CloudWatch alarms and notifications to monitor for failed login attempts
Create Amazon CloudWatch alarms to monitor network traffic through a NAT gateway including monitoring for abnormal outgoing network traffic
Design and deploy scalable, highly available, fault tolerant and reliable applications in AWS
Along with security best practices
Responsible for creating Git hooks to trigger Jenkins build automatically
Monitor infrastructure and applications using CloudWatch, VPC Flow Logs, and Cloud trail
Maintain source code repository using GitHub and performed different operations like branching, merging, and tagging as needed
Implement and manage continuous delivery systems and methodologies on AWS using CI/CD tools like Ansible, Jenkins, Gitlab, CodeComit, CodePipeline etc
Built a fully managed continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline for applications that run on Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS)
Use AWS CodePipeline to model and orchestrate a three-stage pipeline that deploys a containerized application using a blue/green deployment strategy
Implement Kubernetes’ open-source system to manage our containerized applications and the AWS developer tools to manage our source code, builds, and pipelines
Provide technical perspective on infrastructure design options and configurations
Utilize smart services from Appian shared components
Experience in Designing, Capturing, and implementing requirements using Appian BPM suite
Helps define and drive application standards and best practices across the Appian/BPM platform
Implement security best practices in AWS including MFA, access key rotation, encryption using KMS, Security Groups and NACLs, S3 bucket policies and ACLs, mitigating DDOS attacks etc
Use AWS System Manager and Run Command to automate operational tasks across AWS resources
Utilize AWS CLI to automate backups of ephemeral data-stores to S3 buckets and EBS
Use Jira to plan, track, support and close requests, tickets, and incidents
Delegate access across AWS accounts using IAM cross account roles
Define, design, and develop apian/BPM shared components by doing a quick POC to prove the value add
Perform the detailed analysis of the business requirements provided, for Appian development.
Contributed to the development of cloud governance policies that provided clear guidelines around infrastructure usage, security controls, cost management, and maintenance responsibilities.
Enhanced cloud infrastructure efficiency by implementing cost-effective solutions and optimizing resource allocation.

AWS Cloud Engineer

NovoShield, LLC

07.2020 - 07.2021

Installed the application on AWS EC2 AMI, Red Hat, Ubuntu instances
Designed secured, cost optimized, highly available and fault tolerant infrastructure in AWS
Architected and configured Dev/Stage/QA environments in AWS (VPC, subnets, security groups, EC2 instances, load balancer and route53 etc.)
Automated resource provisioning using IAC tool-terraform to configure multiple AWS resources including networking, databases, IAM, security groups etc..
And making use of best practices such as configuring a remote backend and using modules
Good understanding of the principles and best practices of software configuration management in Agile, Scrum and waterfall methodologies
Developed and documented security guardrails for AWS Cloud environments
Responsible for taking the source code compiling using Maven and packaging it in a distributable format such as JAR, WAR and EAR Packages
Deployed Prometheus with Grafana to monitor the Kubernetes cluster and configured alerts firing when different conditions met
Containerized applications using Dockerfile best practices, and integrated with different microservice
Used Kubernetes to deploy scale, load balance, scale and manage Docker containers
Created Pods, deployments, services, and replication controller in Kubernetes
Managed deployments in Kubernetes, by setting up multi nodes cluster and deployed containerized applications
Experience with Agile-Scrum methodologies, effectively involved in sprint backlog refinement to smooth user stories flow
Coordinated with product owner, scrum master to refine the backlog and understand the project requirement
End to end building, deploying, configuring and implementation from local to QA environment to UAT and Production
Automated the continuous integration and deployment using Jenkins and Docker
Efficiency in using tools like Docker, Ansible, for deploying, automation and good knowledge using backup Nexus repository
Deployed applications to Tomcat application servers and static content to Apache web servers
Worked in an Agile development team to deliver end to end continuous integration/ delivery products in an open-source environment using tools like Jenkins
Worked on Git to manage source code and used shell scripts day to day for automating task
Implemented security best practices in AWS including multi factor authentication, access key rotation, role-based permissions, enforced strong password policy, configured security groups and NACLs, S3 bucket policies and ACLs etc
Optimized cost through reserved instances, selection and changing of EC2 instance types based on resource need, S3 storage classes and S3 lifecycle policies, leveraging Auto scaling etc
Leveraged EC2 Create Snapshot API call to create snapshots of EBS Volumes on scheduled intervals
Configured CloudWatch alarm rules for operational and performance metrics for our AWS resources and applications
Created and managed a Docker deployment pipeline for custom application images in the AWs cloud using Jenkins
Configured S3 events to set up automated communication between S3 and other AWS services
Developed CI/CD to standardize the infrastructure and automate the DevOps processes, allowing customers to rapidly build, test, and release code while minimizing errors
Experience packaging application into a Docker container and deploying on ECS
Managing multiple task definition on ECS services
Prepare Statement of Work, Weekly Status reports and governance reports
Migration of high availability webservers and databases to AWS EC2 and RDS with minimum or no downtime
Built custom images though Docker server, Docker compose with multiple local containers and created production grade workflows and a continuous application workflow for multiple images and managed those containers using ECS
Experience on Deployment Automation & Containerization (Docker, Elastic Container Service)
Leveraged Intelligent Tiering storage class of S3 to minimize storage cost for objects whose access pattern is not known
Ensured data recoverability by implementing systems snapshot, AMIs, RDS Replicas and application-level backup to S3
Create Docker images using a Docker file, work on Docker container snapshots, removing images and managing Docker volumes
Hands-on knowledge of software containerization platforms like Docker and container orchestration tools like Elastic Container Service
Build VPCs with Private and Public Subnet couple with Transit gateways setup back to on premise datacenter and corporate offices.
Automated daily backups of critical data using AWS S3, reducing the risk of data loss in case of system failures.
Participated in architectural discussions to build confidence and promote customer success when developing new and migrating existing applications, software and services on AWS platform.

AWS Infrastructure Engineer

Magass Group, Inc

02.2018 - 07.2020

Managed provisioning of AWS infrastructures using Cloud Formation and Terraform
Design for high availability and business continuity using self-healing-based architectures, fail-over routing policies, multi-AZ deployment of EC2 instances, ELB health checks, Auto Scaling, and other disaster recovery models
Created patch management using Systems Manager automation for multi-region and multi account execution
Working closely with the development and operations organizations to implement the necessary tools and process to support the automation of builds, deployments, testing and infrastructure (infrastructure as code) using Ansible
Implemented detective guardrails using Cloud Custodian policies and AWS config
Designed and implemented for elasticity and scalability using Elastic Cache, CloudFront – Edge locations, RDS (read replicas, instance sizes) etc
Used System Manager to automate operational tasks across AWS resources
Troubleshooting experience with S3 Bucket, Compute Resources etc
Built kinesis dashboards and applications that react to incoming data and exported data from kinesis to other AWS services including EMR for analytics, S3 for storage, and Redshift for big data and Lambda for event driven actions
Developed and documented security guardrails for AWS Cloud environments.
Reduced downtime by proactively identifying and addressing potential issues in the IT infrastructure.
Streamlined processes by automating repetitive tasks using scripting languages such as Python, Perl, or Shell scripts.

System Administrator

JNP Clinical Consulting

11.2016 - 02.2018

Install, configure, and maintain servers and networks.
Monitor system performance and ensure reliability and availability.
These include local area networks (LAN), wide area networks (WAN) and other data communication systems such as intranets or internet cafes within their company
Upgrading, installing, and configuring application software and computer hardware
Used CloudWatch for monitoring our environment
Troubleshooting and providing technical support to employees
Creating and managing system permissions and user accounts Solution VPC peering with other Accounts allowing access and routing to service and users of separate account to communicate with each other
Network, CPU, Disk, and connectivity monitoring with CloudWatch and setup to trigger alarm and notify system administrators
Aide setup for and configured for logs files detail monitoring and alerts notification when changes occurred
Performed root-cause analysis of recurring issues, system backup, and security setup
Security groups configured and locked down to the various authorized subnet and IP addresses in AWS environment
Quickly arrange repair for hardware in occasion of hardware failure
Performing regular security tests and security monitoring
In this task, I create a CloudWatch metric filter to locate authentication failure event messages in the logs from the database server
I go further to create a CloudWatch alarm and notification to email us any time there are too many login failures within a 5-minute window
Created Amazon CloudWatch alarms to monitor network traffic through a NAT gateway
In addition to monitoring authentication failures, I also configure monitory for abnormal outgoing network traffic
In this task, I also implemented a CloudWatch alarm to monitor metrics related to outgoing traffic through a NAT gateway.

Education

Bachelor of Arts - Biological Sciences

University of Maryland - Baltimore County

Baltimore, MD

Master of Science - Cybersecurity Technology

University of Maryland