Hello! I'm Cariad Eccleston.

I'm a freelance DevOps engineer and technical author.

Let's build something awesome together!

History

• 2004

  Graduated from The University of Salford with a BSc (Hons) Computer Science.

• 2005

  Joined Thomson Reuters as a Junior Developer. Built desktop accounting software with my friends.

• 2016

  Senior DevOps Engineer. Built a global cloud accounting platform with my friends.

• 2017

  Software Team Lead. Led a global DevOps effort to support all Thomson Reuters Tax & Accounting cloud applications with my friends.

• Since 2019

  Indie DevOps contractor. Technical author. Conference speaker. Open Source contributor.

  Hire me for your next project

Infrastructure Engineering

• Infrastructure as Code

  Designed and built infrastructure as code for a scaling, resilient, multi region global accounting platform in Amazon Web Services.

• Languages

  Love Golang, Python + boto3, TypeScript, JavaScript and Node.js. CloudFormation and Troposphere. Bash and PowerShell.

• Workflow

  Load balancers and NGINX as reverse proxy for HTTP requests. RabbitMQ for passing messages between services. Redis for caching packages of work.

• Quality

  Self-documented code. High unit test coverage. Published and evangelised style guidelines. Implemented build failures on guideline deviation. Advocate for peer code review.

• Manual Changes

  They're unavoidable sometimes. Engaged with co-pilots to verify my work in real-time. Ensured documentation for the change was complete, correct and shared.

Continuous Integration / Deployment

• Orchestration

  Built chains of Jenkins projects to perform pipeline tasks. Travis CI to test GitHub pull requests and build + upload releases. CodePipeline to build, test and deploy personal projects.

• Source control

  Team Foundation Server / Azure DevOps Server. Love GitHub and GitLab.

• Builds & Tests

  Created build + test environments for C#.NET, Golang, TypeScript, Python, and custom bundles of scripts and other assets. Orchestrate with Gulp, Grunt, Bash and PowerShell.

• Baking Amazon Machine Images

  Built a Node.js service in TypeScript for baking build artefacts into AMIs. Wrapper around Packer. Automatically disabled exploitable features like remote logins.

• Deployments

  Built a Node.js service in TypeScript for deploying web service platforms. Updated services and database schemas. Rolling updates with health checks and rollback on failure.

• Environments

  Built isolation environments for independent service tests, a full stack environment for integration testing, user acceptance testing and isolated Production environments around the world.

Security

• Code Reviews

  Encouraged my team to think like a hacker during code reviews. Don't just ask “Does this work?” Ask “How could I abuse this to ruin someone's day?"

• Network Routing

  Deployed services to public + private subnets with respect to the minimum required connectivity. Convince me that an endpoint really needs a public IP.

• IAM Policies and Roles

  Passionate about crafting IAM Policies with minimal surface area, giving users absolute-minimum permissions and having them assume IAM Roles as-and-when they need escalated privileges.

• Secret, No-Human Credentials

  Built infrastructure for encrypting, storing and rotating database credentials in Amazon Web Services Secrets Manager. No human ever needs to know the credentials, and IAM policies restrict who can go and find out.

• KMS Key Lifecycle Management

  Contributed to a corporate toolbox for ensuring encryption keys are created with appropriate permissions, cannot be modified without gatekeeper approval, and alerting when a key is scheduled for deletion before encrypted data + backups are lost.

Site Reliability Engineering

• Monitoring

  Kibana and Datadog for logging and metrics. Icinga dashboards with custom plugins. CloudWatch alarms for urgent notifications. Built a public API for third-parties to monitor our platform.

• Quality

  Evangelised quality of log messages to aid troubleshooting. Promoted a common set of metrics for the platform so that requests could be tracked and services compared.

• Self-healing

  Deployed services with application health checks. Unhealthy instances are automatically terminated and replaced while spare capacity keeps the platform available. High uptime without human intervention.

• Investigations

  Took responsibility for reviewing post-mortem alerts from unhealthy services and investigating failures. Collaborated with development teams to share information and fix problems. Wrote and published incident reports.

Open Source Projects

• aws-hugo

  Infrastructure as code and pipelne for deploying Hugo-based websites to Amazon Web Services. Golang and CloudFormation. Static hosting in S3 behind CloudFront. Lambda@Edge functions handle directories and enforce HTTPS. CodePipeline to build, test and deploy when site code is pushed to GitHub.

  aws-hugo homepage

• s3headersetter

  Cross-platform CLI application + Golang module for setting HTTP headers on S3 objects. Great for setting Cache-Control and Content-Type in static hosting.

  s3headersetter (executable) homepage

  gos3headersetter (Golang module) homepage

• Golang Lambda Functions

  A collection of Golang lambda functions for deploying databases with secret credentials and rotating credentials.

  gordsplus-createlambda homepage

  gordsplus-deletelambda homepage

  gordsplus-rotatepasswordlambda homepage

• WordPress database deployment + backup

  Python packages for deploying WordPress databases and backing-up + restoring entire WordPress state. Supports secret credentials if deploying to Amazon Web Services.

  py-wordpress-database homepage

  py-wordpress-backup homepage

Talks

• TechExeter Annual Conference, 2019

  “Strong, secure & human-free database credentials in Amazon Web Services”

• Nottingham AWS User Group, 2017

  “ONESOURCE Statutory Reporting: The Pipeline to Production”

• Thomson Reuters AWS User Group, 2017

  “Redeveloping ONESOURCE Statutory Reporting for Amazon Web Services”

• Out & Equal Workplace Summit, 2013

  “Virtual Employee Resource Groups: Connect Your Global Membership Using Social Media”

Let's build something together!

Could I be a good fit for your project? Let's have a chat!

Email me at cariadeccleston@icloud.com or say hey to me on Twitter at @cariadeccleston.

• Yes, I enjoy remote working with global teams. I have many years of experience working with teams across the UK, USA and India, and a mindset for collaborating across Slack, shared code and documentation.
• Yes, I'd love to work on-site if you're within reach of public transport from Exeter. Travel is always negotiable.
• No, I cannot work for startup equity. My landlord only accepts cash for keeping a roof over my head.