CETRE SysAdmin Services
Matt Brock - freelance sysadmin, devops and cloud engineer based in London, UK
Over 20 years of system admininistation, operations and infrastructure experience
COVID-19 update
CETRE SysAdmin Services continues to operate as normal during the Coronavirus pandemic and lockdown. Matt's services are available for organisations feeling the strain during this difficult period, who are looking to keep their infrastructure up and running as efficiently as possible with minimal costs and resource usage. Matt's services are also available for organisations taking advantage of this slower period to make improvements or launch projects requiring new infrastructure and devops engineering.
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.
Steven Bullen, Technical Manager, The Mandy Network Ltd
Matt is an excellent SysAdmin and helps us when needed. He knows these systems like the back of his hand. He doesn't waste time and gets the job done. We are very happy with him.
Darren Sullivan, Head of Development, Cryptografx Security Solutions, Inc
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.
Colin Rendell, Operations Director, Hummingbird Bakery Ltd
He has brought stability and reliability to all our different environments. He brings a huge amount of enthusiasm and knowledge.
Sam Lawrence, CTO, FSB Technology UK Ltd
Matt has been invaluable in setting up our Amazon Web Services environment. He has a thorough knowledge of application hosting.
Richard Vicary, Technical Manager, LiveBook Ltd
Matt is an excellent sysadmin, meticulous and reliable, and I am very happy to recommend him.
Eamonn Vincent, Director and Partner, Media Match Inc
About Matt and what he provides
Matt provides dependable sysadmin, devops and cloud engineering services for organisations who don't need a full-time sysadmin or who need additional infrastructure expertise. He often works with smaller businesses and startups, and he also works with larger companies initiating new projects. Matt operates on a flexible part-time basis, and he offers ad hoc support for issues that arise outside normal working hours. He offers a flat hourly rate for ongoing work, and he can provide one-off consultancy for a bespoke fee.
Matt works mainly with Linux and other Unix-like systems such as BSD. He has extensive experience with many technologies in a wide range of industries, which enables him to assess the bigger picture in any existing or planned infrastructure. He can rearchitect as needed, optimising for cost, security, stability and performance, before fine-tuning the details and implementing the best solutions.
Matt mainly works with cloud computing infrastructure and he specialises in Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform, though he is also very experienced with administration of physical hardware. He believes strongly in the devops philosophy of working closely with developers to utilise as much automation as possible for reduced overheads and increased efficiency.
Areas of expertise
- Caching solutions (Varnish, Squid, Memcached, Redis)
- Cloud computing (Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, Rackspace)
- Clustering, high availability, and disaster recovery (RAID, LVM, Pacemaker/Corosync)
- Collaboration tools and sharing (Confluence, Jira, Samba)
- Configuration management (Ansible)
- Data centre deployments (HP ProLiant, Dell PowerEdge)
- Database administration and tuning (MySQL, MongoDB, PostgreSQL)
- Infrastructure load balancing, scaling and migration (HAProxy, BIND, Cisco)
- IT management (macOS, Windows)
- Linux/Unix administration (Red Hat, CentOS, Amazon Linux, Ubuntu, Debian, FreeBSD)
- Mail systems and bulk email deliveries (Postfix, Exim, Courier IMAP, Dovecot, OpenDKIM, Postgrey, Mailchimp)
- Monitoring, analytics and notifications (Nagios, AWStats, Webalizer, New Relic, Elastic Stack/Elasticsearch/Kibana/Logstash)
- Scripting and automation (Bash, Perl, Python)
- Security of hosts and networks (iptables, ModSecurity, mod_evasive, pfSense)
- Software development and support, with build and release management (Git, Subversion, Jenkins, GitHub, Bitbucket)
- Virtualisation and containerisation (KVM, Proxmox, VirtualBox, VMWare, LXC, Docker, Kubernetes, Vagrant)
- Web servers and applications (Apache, nginx, PHP, Node.js, Java)
Current and previous clients
- Alpine LDN
- New website infrastructure deployed on Google Cloud Platform for this brand, design and digital agency
- Application Craft
- Management of infrastructure monitoring for Application Craft, a cloud development platform
- Ashridge Nurseries
- AWS engineering and migration management for this online garden centre
- Aspire London
- AWS infrastructure management for this web design and development company
- Bevan Kidwell
- Server, security and network management for this corporate and commercial solicitor
- Cryptografx Security
- System administration and AWS consultancy for this two-factor authentication provider
- EduNation
- Management and migration of AWS infrastructure for private tuition website FirstTutors
- FSB Technology
- Long-term systems management and devops for physical and virtual infrastructure in a high-transaction online gaming environment
- General-Index
- All AWS infrastructure setup and server administration for this alternative commodity pricing service
- Hummingbird Bakery
- Server and infrastructure management and support for this American-style bakery
- LondonMarketing
- Migration of long-running London visitor website LondonTown from the data centre to AWS
- The Mandy Network
- Long-term AWS infrastructure planning, management and support for this network of entertainment industry bookings websites
- Media Match Inc
- Infrastructure consultancy for various projects
- Memrise
- Migration and scaling of AWS environment for web-based learning application
- MyLiveBook
- Deployment of AWS infrastructure for this online training environment
- Phenomenists Internet
- Ongoing infrastructure support and AWS deployment for this creative web design service company
- Razor Occam
- Involvement in major AWS deployments for industrial suppliers Zoro and Cromwell
Contact details and links
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