Josh Beard

IT Professional / DevOps / Sysadmin

Summary

IT professional with a strong background in systems administration, cloud, and DevOps with over 13 years of experience and collaborations with more than a hundred teams across hundreds of projects.

Experience

Lead DevSecOps Engineer with Ventera, Inc at USGS

June 2022 - Present · Remote

  • Contracted to Water Resources Mission Area at the US Geological Survey.

  • DevSecOps on a small team working on a project focused on modernizing and advancing a highly-utilized set of services for water data collected and provided by the USGS.

  • Collaboratively designed, implemented, and supported infrastructure and CI/CD pipelines for a Python codebase of Lambda functions, modularized static websites, and supporting resources.

  • Cloud-native and 'serverless' application development and infrastructure.

  • Integrated and automated code analysis into developer workflow and pipeline.

Key technology: AWS (CloudFormation, Lambda, CloudFront, S3, IAM, RDS, API Gateway, more), GitLab, Python, Jira

Lead DevOps Engineer with Apogee Engineering, LLC at USGS

September 2015 - May 2022 · Remote

  • Contracted to Science Analytics and Synthesis at the US Geological Survey.

  • Lead and contributed to many of the group's most challenging technical projects.

  • Collaborated with over a dozen teams to deliver applications to the USGS science community.

  • Worked with hundreds of codebases spanning several languages and product teams.

  • Responsible for the architecture and implementation of the IT platform for over 50 USGS products.

  • Migrated over 50 products from on-premise and on-VM deployments to AWS deployments, using Docker and native AWS services.

  • Composed CI/CD pipelines for hundreds of projects, improving consistency through automation, empowering product teams, and reducing friction for releasing software.

  • Authored and maintained hundreds of pages of robust documentation for "all things DevOps" and project-specific documentation, utilizing Markdown and adopting a "docs-as-code" workflow.

  • Instructed colleagues on a variety of subjects, including Docker, AWS, and Terraform.

  • Implemented and maintained configuration management (Puppet, Ansible) across hundreds of servers.

  • Implemented and maintained Infrastructure as Code across dozens of applications and services.

  • Developed new HTTP architecture, utilizing CloudFront, Nginx, and S3.

Key technology: Linux, GitLab, Docker, AWS (wide range of services), Terraform, Ansible, Puppet, Python, Packer, VMware vSphere, Jira, Artifactory, Bamboo, BitBucket, Tomcat, Ruby, Nginx, Traefik, Apache

Sr. Professional Services Engineer with Puppet Inc.

September 2013 - April 2015 · Remote

  • Consulted on Puppet products and DevOps practices for a wide range of customers, including some of Puppet's largest customers and most sophisticated engagements.

  • Instructed dozens of classes on Puppet products to organizations and general public.

  • Contributed Puppet modules and other tools for community use and used within Puppet's commercial products.

  • Developed Puppet, Ruby, and shell code for extending products and automating processes.

  • Consulted on pre-sales, scoping of work, and post-sales support.

  • Earned high marks for customer satisfaction, team work, and professionalism.

Key technology: Linux, Puppet and Puppet Enterprise, Git, GitLab, Packer, Vagrant, Jira, Tomcat, Ruby, Shell, Nginx, Apache, WebSphere

Linux/Unix Systems Administrator with Douglas School District

January 2010 - September 2013 · Box Elder, SD

  • Deployed and administered school district Linux and FreeBSD servers and services for thousands of users.

  • Improved integration across network services for over 2,000 students, faculty, and staff.

  • Administered network file systems, HTTP, DNS/DHCP, Firewalls, Monitoring, Logging, Mail (SMTP, POP3, IMAP, filtering, webmail), and other services for all district users.

  • Improved workstation provisioning through automation, deploying several hundred new workstations a year.

  • Introduced configuration management (Puppet) to manage servers.

  • Redesigned district website and implemented WordPress to manage it.

Key technology: FreeBSD, Linux, MacOS, Puppet, Apache, Nginx, BIND, Shell, HTML, CSS, PHP, Ruby, KVM, pf, Sophos, Graylog, Nginx, Icinga, NFS, Postfix, WordPress

Tier II Technical Support with Apple, Inc.

October 2008 - January 2010 · Remote

    Signal Support Systems Specialist with US Army

    August 2006 - October 2008 · Fort Carson, CO

      Skills

      12 Factor App Methodology, AWS (EC2, RDS, IAM, S3, Elasticsearch, ECS, EFS, CloudFront, Lambda, Route53, Secrets Manager, Load Balancing, CloudFormation, CDK, misc), Accessibility, Analysis (e.g. Codacy, CodeFactor, Mend, DeepSource, Owasp ZAP, rspec), Ansible, Apache, Artifactory, Atlassian, Bamboo, Bash and Shell, BitBucket, CI/CD, Cloud, Debian/Ubuntu, DigitalOcean, Docker, Elasticsearch, Everything is Code, FreeBSD, Git, GitHub, GitHub Actions, GitHub Workflows, GitLab, GitLab CI/CD, Graylog, HAProxy, HTML/CSS, Infrastructure as Code, Jira, LXC, MariaDB/MySQL, MongoDB, Nginx, PHP, Packer, Postfix, PostgreSQL, Puppet/Puppet Enterprise, Python, RedHat/CentOS, Ruby, Security and Compliance, Sensu, Serverless, Terraform (AWS, VMware, DigitalOcean, Proxmox, misc), Test-Driven Development (TDD), Tomcat, Traefik, Vagrant