CETRE devops platform_engineering site_reliability

 

EXPERIENCE

Competent, reliable DevOps Engineering, Platform Engineering and Site Reliability Engineering for entrepreneurs, startups and SMEs.

FLEXIBILITY

Freelance adaptability to take on consultancy, engineering projects, ongoing maintenance and infrastructure support on a flexible basis.

SIMPLICITY

Simple hourly billing and straightforward monthly invoices with a detailed itemised breakdown of all work done by project, task, date and time.

 

 

We have been working with Matt for more than 10 years now. He knows our system inside out and is the single point of contact for all our infrastructure needs. He is extremely responsive to our requirements and always happy to help. He is a keen problem solver with an attention to detail. We are really happy with this association.

Working with Matt was a pleasure. The level of organisation and detail was critical to the smooth and continuous running of our servers. I cannot say enough good things regarding Matt and what he brought to the table. I look forward to more opportunities in the future.

We suffered a DDoS attack, and the real testament to Matt's skill and ability is that the attackers simply gave up and went away. Our site stayed up, business continued and what could have been a crisis was not even a drama. I would recommend his services without hesitation... as long as he has enough time left for us!

Matt Brock

MATT BROCK

I'm Matt Brock, operating via my company CETRE Ltd. I've provided freelance engineering work and consultancy services for two dozen customers since 2011. I'm a DevOps Engineer with over 10 years of cloud experience, and 25 years of infrastructure engineering and Linux system administration. I'm based in London.

I enjoy the challenge of solving problems with good communication to build trusted relationships with customers. I help customers to scale more effectively with improved automation, whilst factoring in cost reductions, enhanced security, effective proactive analysis, and better workflow between developers and operations. I aim to complete projects with good quality handover and documentation. Where needed, I can provide ongoing monitoring, maintenance and support.

I specialise in helping clients with: DevOps; IaC; CI/CD; automation; site reliability & monitoring; security; cloud & bare-metal; containers & virtualisation; scaling, redundancy & DR; infrastructure migrations; cost management.

Contact me if you need help with any of the above and we can discuss your requirements.

He has brought stability and reliability to all our different environments. He brings a huge amount of enthusiasm and knowledge.

Matt has been invaluable in setting up our Amazon Web Services environment. He has a thorough knowledge of application hosting.

Matt is an excellent engineer, meticulous and reliable, and I am very happy to recommend him.

 

 

TECHNOLOGY
AWS logo
GCP logo
Terraform logo
Ansible logo
Jenkins logo
Linux logo
Git logo
GitHub logo
Python logo
BASH logo
Kubernetes logo
Docker logo

Cloud computing: AWS (Aurora Serverless, Certificate Manager, CloudFront, CloudSearch, CloudWatch, CodeDeploy, Connect, EC2, ECR, ECS, EKS, Elastic Beanstalk, ElastiCache, EventBridge Scheduler, IAM, Lambda, Lex, RDS, Route 53, S3, Secrets Manager, SES, SNS, SQS, VPC), Cloudflare, GCP (Artifact Registry, Cloud DNS, Cloud SQL, GCE, GCS, GKE, IAM), Slack integration, SoftNAS
Containers and virtualisation: Docker, Kubernetes, KVM, Linux Containers (LXC), ProxMox, Vagrant, VirtualBox
Development: Bash, Perl, PHP, Powershell, Python
DevOps: Ansible, git, GitHub, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, Jira, Packer, Terraform
Hardware and network: Cisco, HP ProLiant, Juniper, NetScaler, pfSense
OS: Amazon Linux, CentOS, CMAN/Corosync/Pacemaker, Debian, Kickstart, Linux, LVM, RHEL, Ubuntu
Servers: Apache, BIND, Courier IMAP, Exim, HAProxy, Java, Memcached, MongoDB, MySQL, nginx, OpenSSH, PHP, Postfix, PostgreSQL, RabbitMQ, Redis, Samba, Solr, Squid, stunnel, Varnish
Tools and monitoring: Datadog, Elasticsearch, Kibana, Logstash, Nagios, New Relic, Opsview, Splunk

 

 

CUSTOMERS
Gamer Dating logo
Ashridge Nurseries logo
Custodia logo
The Mandy Network logo
General Index logo
Brick Freedom logo
Efficient Data Group logo
Team Absence logo
Phenomenists logo
Cryptografx logo
Bevan Kidwell logo
Edunation logo
FSB logo
Hummingbird Bakery logo
Alpine logo
London Marketing logo
Memrise logo
MyLiveBook logo
Media Match logo

RECENT CUSTOMER SUCCESSES


Built cloud infrastructure platform for new e-commerce site, managed via IaC with full auto-scaling and redundancy, significantly reducing administration overhead, performance problems and downtime.

Built application for on-the-fly image conversion to older formats, ensuring that customers with legacy browsers can view site correctly.

Successfully mitigated DoS/DDoS attacks and hardened servers/network to resolve ongoing security problems.

Migrated all services from legacy data centre infrastructure to cloud for improved resiliency and redundancy, more efficient management, and reduced costs.

Created monitoring system with visual reporting of metric and log history, including development of proprietary plugins, enabling comprehensive insights into performance issues and rapid response to emergencies.

Migrated manual configuration to automated configuration management solution with version control for much safer and more efficient management of servers and infrastructure.

Built automated virtualised development environment, allowing developers to work in an environment properly compatible and in sync with production.

Built new mail cluster for efficient delivery of over a million legitimate emails per day with excellent sender reputation, fully integrated into automated configuration management system.

Developed internal REST API for effective querying of venue and event data for frontend applications.

Delivered cloud-based contact centre solution for large secure public sector customer, to handle routine calls with automated flows enabling call centre agents to have significantly more time for handling atypical and serious issues.

Built automated data management system integrated with configuration management and version control, allowing timely delivery of up-to-date commodity data to internal users and customers.

Built extensive backup management application, making it simpler for users to manage backups in a more intuitive and robust manner.

Resolved problems implementing encryption for cloud messaging cluster allowing completion of product, and developed IaC solution to automatically build containers and manage cluster.

Researched, specced and built full bare-metal production environment with full redundancy for online gaming provider.

Built NoSQL database cluster for production, including development of automated system to safely solve problem of storage not being reclaimed on small clusters.

Designed, tuned and built bare-metal database cluster for production, optimised for efficient query filtering and sorting.

Built bare-metal load-balancing cluster for production capable of handling very large numbers of incoming connections, including contribution to HAProxy source code after identifying issue with cookie security.

Built virtualised development server environment, allowing much more agile deployment of virtual machines for development and testing.

Built CI/CD solution necessary for development team to build, test and deliver code efficiently.

Delivered log querying and reporting solution to development team, allowing them to effectively visualise and filter log output for faster issue resolution.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Matt Brock DevOps

 

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Company number 10442316

1 Claydon Business Park, Great Blakenham, Ipswich IP6 0NL