Here I relate some of my experience in the Cloud area.
1995 Linux lead in ISP
I started working for ISPs (Internet Service Providers) in 1995, just when Internet landed in Catalonia, and since I worked in several of them, leading the Linux department, the BBS, writing automation in Perl, Bash, C, later in Python, and dealing with Hardware issues and replacements.
I migrated all Windows servers, with costly licenses per user, to free Linux Software.
1996 First Messenger
I created the first Messenger. Was called Canal (channel). Had voice, videogames, bots, emoticons, feeling status, file transfer with resume…
I developed a lot of technologies to be able to scale massively.
2004 My own Start up company and CSP, with virtualization
I created my own Company, impulsing several of my own Start up projects, and offering services as CSP (Cloud Service Providers) sharing my Datacenter infrastructure (offering email, web, co-location, VM’s based in Linux and Windows). I had everything virtualized with VMware. I was using supermicro Servers that I ordered from the States, and they were being served between 1 and 6 months.
2010 Started using Amazon AWS
I started using Amazon AWS: EC2, RDS, Cache, DNS
2011 Fixing scaling problems in AWS
2011 I fixed the scalability problems and bottlenecks of Social Point which was using Amazon AWS, rightscale, database sharding with RDS (dbshards)
2012 Multi-cloud Dashboard
2012 I lead the development of ECManaged, a multi-cloud Dashboard to control all your Instances from CSP/VMs/Baremetal from a single panel. We won a Europen contest.
I created Auto-Scaling for any provider (even not supporting AutoScaling), simple wizards, templates to provision provider agnostic… We were providing integration with Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Softlayer (now IBM Cloud), RackSpace, LunaCloud, OpenStack, Baremetal… any compatible with libcloud, libvirt… We were using PHP, Python, Puppet, RabbitMQ…
2013 CMIPS
I created CMIPS.net to compare the performance and price of different Cloud Service Provider’s instances.
2013 First time invited to travel by Amazon AWS
I was invited by Amazon to Dublin for a SDM position in CloudWatch, I gave them the idea of providing Auto-Scaling.
Since then they have invited me to Madrid, for a leadership position in their Headquarters in the south of Europe, to Seattle’s, US, Headquarters for a SDM position in a project related to hiring.
2014 CTO of a startup sold by USD $45 M
I became CTO of trip4real, sold to airbnb by USD $45 Million.
I migrated from Microsoft Azure to Amazon AWS. At that time Azure suffered some failures and VMs were very limited in CPU power.
Leading my team, we rewrote the web to support multi-language, multi-country, using Laravel PHP Framework.
2014 I helped the Google Cloud Team
In 2014 I helped google Cloud Team to improve their new platform, beta, Google Cloud Compute Engine.
I was passing feedback, ideas, improvements and bugs, and all the team were reading my reports. Paul Nash wrote a thanks message in cmips site.
2014 I met and start to help CloudSigma
In 2014 I met CloudSigma’s CTO in Silicon Valley, and I started collaborating with them. My suggestion of offering easy wizards to deploy the instances, multiplied the conversion of users trying the platform.
I help to rack the first hardware in Silicon Valley Data Center, discovered Bulgaria were they have cool offices, and played with very cool multi-CPU servers.
2015 Scaling and using IBM Softlayer Cloud
In 2015 after helping them as SRE and creating a solution that Scales infinitely (PHP, nodejs, phantomjs) I became CTO of genapp Start up (know as the police of the ads for mobile) where we were using Softlayer (IBM Cloud), MemSQL Database, different web servers (commercial and Open Source), PHP, Bash, nodejs, phantomjs and Python.
2016 Migrations
In this time I was migrating workloads from Azure to Amazon AWS, from Amazon AWS to Google…
2017 Cloud Architect for Sanmina in Ireland
In 2017 I was hired by Sanmina (US Fortune 500) as Cloud Architect and relocated to Ireland.
I created a Storage Software Solution based in ZFS, DRAID, using Python and C running in our Storage Servers, sold to Cloud Storage providers.
I recruited and leaded a team in Ireland and US.
2020 Software Engineering, Operations Center, for Blizzard in Ireland
In 2020 January, I joined Activision Blizzard as Operations Engineer where I use all the technologies related to Cloud and Data Center provisioning at Scale and IaC and I write Automation mainly in Python. Recipes and shell too. Automate everything.
I’m member of the standards guild, were we define good practices, and I teach Unit Testing and Python programming to my colleagues.
2021 Writing books about automating Amazon AWS with SDK boto3 and about Docker (including Python SDK)
I wrote two books about Cloud technologies:
2022 Based on my previous creations, I created an Erasure Coding infinite scaling for Storage thesis
As part of my university studies in Ireland university my final project and thesis consisted in the creation of an Erasure Coding implementation that allows to scale infinitely, which automatically balances the disk space across the nodes, with node error detection, with no single point of failure, super easy maintenance and really safe for disaster and recovery.
If you have dealt with other commercial or Open Source Erasure Coding solutions you had a dedicated for that and you know why my project is a win.
For more info, demo videos, etc:
Final notes
I’ve been in several Data Centers across the world (some secret I can’t disclose), and I’ve used rack servers from IBM, Dell, Supermicro, HP, Viking (4U 90 drives, 60 drives, 2U and 1U All-Array SSD, NVMe) and NICs and switches up to 100Gigabit.
I understand some problems that top Internet companies face, that few people think about. From time to time I release Open Source solutions to ease with that and Scaling.
I used several virtualization products: different Vmware solutions, OpenStack, Docker, self made…
When I was invited to Menlo Park by Facebook I was told that they learned things from me that they will use. :)
In Ireland I got my degree HDip in Computer Science: Cloud Computing from MTU university, how not. :)
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