Ivan Tomica

Hi there! Let me briefly introduce myself.

I am a seasoned professional with expertise in setting up and managing web servers, load balancers, databases, CI/CD pipelines, containers, and serverless technologies, focusing primarily on Free Software and Open Source.

Through various complex projects, I have become proficient in designing, implementing, and maintaining robust, scalable infrastructures. I have extensive experience in optimizing performance, ensuring high availability, and enhancing system security.

I excel in collaborating with cross-functional teams to deliver optimal solutions for clients and possess strong problem-solving abilities. I am passionate about continuous learning and staying updated with industry trends, always committed to delivering exceptional results and gaining new insights in the process.

Experience

SYSCTL

Owner | DevOps Consultant - February 2023 - Present

  • Self-employed, delivering innovative infrastructure solutions, working on a variety of interesting projects.

ByteRunner

Senior Cloud Infrastructure Engineer - September 2023 - July 2024

  • Worked in a team of six engineers for a huge international client operating in the Insurance industry.
  • Joined during the project of migration from the old EC2 based setup consisting of Nomad, Consul, HAProxy, WSO2 to an AWS native setup powered by the ECS (Mix of Fargate and EC2), API Gateway, Cloudfront etc.
  • Architected and started migration of another ECS based project to the EKS setup.
  • Wrote many Terraform modules and promoted IaC as a way of working within the team. Used Terraform Enterprise to automate workflows, promote collaboration and provide self-service platform for both Infrastructure and Development teams.
  • Day-to-day I worked with technologies such as AWS EC2, ECS (both EC2 and Fargate), Lambdas, AWS EKS (Kubernetes) using AWS ALB ingress controller, Karpenter for scaling EC2 machines, Fargate profiles, AWS API Gateway, WAF, Cloudfront, AWS networking components such as VPC Peerings, Transit Gateways, Direct Connect.

Infinum

DevOps Engineer - May 2023 - September 2023

  • Upon realizing the Team Lead position was not the right fit for me at that time within the company I decided to return to a more technical position in order to focus on learning and personal development.

Infinum

DevOps Team Lead - October 2021 - May 2023

  • Led the team of 6 engineers at the time
  • Held regular 1-on-1 meetings, conducted career-talk cycles and provided personal development guidance for direct reports
  • Worked on improving the team processes in terms of planning, resourcing, technical initiatives. Organized work on company level and team level OKRs
  • Conducted job interviews, hiring, and salary corrections

Infinum

DevOps Lead Engineer - November 2020 - October 2021

  • In addition to the regular DevOps Engineer duties my role was to foster cross-team collaboration, and push various technical initiatives within the team and the company.
  • Designed and implemented initial Wordpress CI/CD process in collaboration with the Wordpress Lead Engineer
  • Developed a bunch of Terraform modules, set project structure and pushed adoption of IaC as a standard way of working with the infrastructure
  • Started the initiative and supported the effort of moving Rails based applications into “Docker” containers.

Infinum

DevOps Engineer - August 2018 - November 2020

  • Designed and deployed highly available infrastructure using AWS and Azure public cloud providers while incorporating security best practices
  • Collaborated with developers, project managers and clients to provide optimal and cost effective solutions and integrate industry-level best practices
  • Automated most of the day-to-day common tasks with Ansible. Wrote a fair share of the Ansible roles and playbooks that are used within the team to this day
  • Provided the platform for easy execution of Ansible playbooks and scheduling recurring tasks in the form of AWX (Ansible Tower)
  • Helped with setting up CI/CD processes using tools such as SemaphoreCI, Gitlab, AWS CodePipeline, Jenkins and Github Actions
  • Worked with Docker and containers in general. Designed “build, publish and deploy to ECR and ECS” process
  • Set up and maintained smaller number of Kubernetes (AWS EKS) setups
  • Configured and maintained monitoring solutions such as Cloudwatch, Sensu, Grafana, Prometheus, Loki to watch over various AWS services, applications such as Nginx, Phusion Passenger, Redis, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and various Elixir, Rails, Java, PHP based applications to name a few.
  • Regularly contributed to various project-related discussions and helped colleagues with their tasks by providing them with guidance on how to best approach solving the particular challenge

Crossvallia

System Administrator - December 2017 - August 2018

  • Company provided managed hosting services to high-volume, world-renowned websites. Measuring network traffic in the neighborhood of 5-7% of the global internet traffic.
  • Performed various systems administration tasks, analyzed issues and performed required steps to remediate them. Communicated directly with clients.
  • Work provided me with an opportunity to gathered extensive experience and knowledge of various underlying system components and infrastructure design patterns.
  • Administered mostly Debian based systems but also worked with CentOS as well
  • Configured infrastructure for the new websites with the emphasis on optimization and high-availability. For high-availability we were utilizing multiple layers of HAProxy load-balancers and configured them to distribute traffic between multiple web, caching and database instances.
  • Configured, monitored and resolved issues with various system components and services such as IPTables, Apache, Nginx, PHP-FPM, Supervisor, PM2, Percona MySQL, Sphinx, Redis, Memcached + MCRouter, Monit, Bind, Postfix and many more.
  • Investigated hardware related issues and coordinated component or server replacements with data center technicians.
  • Automated service and system configuration using Puppet automation system.

TouchSupport

Level 3 Technical support - January 2017 - November 2017

  • Performed regular system administration and setup tasks as well as the 3rd level support for end-users, managing both dedicated and shared hosting environments
  • Conducted server and service level analysis, finding hardware and configuration software related issues, performance tuning and proposing changes for the long-term improvements
  • Worked with various various web, email, database and other technologies built-in into cPanel and Plesk like Apache, Lightspeed, Nginx, Apache Tomcat, MySQL, Exim, Postfix, Dovecot, OpenVPN, BIND, PowerDNS, MyDNS, supporting mainly CentOS and CloudLinux distributions but sometimes also Ubuntu and Debian based systems.
  • Worked with and managed various underlying virtualization services such as XEN, OpenVZ, Onapp, KVM and VMware ESXi
  • Installed, configured and used R1Soft CDP to ensure regular server backups
  • Performed various application and server level security breach analysis.

TouchSupport

Level 2 Technical support - July 2016 - December 2016

  • Provided white-label support for various web-hosting companies.
  • Investigated and resolved server-related issues, rarely escalating to 3rd level support, achieving over 95% resolution rate

Avalon

Linux System Administrator - February 2014 - July 2016

  • Provisioned virtual and dedicated servers, mainly based on CentOS, utilizing Kickstart for initial setup automation
  • Configured and maintained multiple shared and dedicated web hosting environments, mostly powered by cPanel, where I also gathered extensive experience with accompanying services such as Apache+mod_php, Apache+PHP-FPM, Exim, MySQL, Bind and more.
  • Configured and maintained server and application level monitoring using a combination of Monit and Nagios
  • Configured and maintained R1Soft CDP backup policies
  • Automated common tasks performed by the technical support department by writing various shell scripts, provided guidance and written numerous guides to help colleagues in their day-to-day work

Avalon

Technical support - May 2012 - February 2014

  • Provided first line of technical support using phone, live-chat and e-mail for clients of our shared and dedicated web and email hosting services based on Linux and Windows servers
  • Performed basic server monitoring, remediation of simpler issues and issue escalation

Certifications

AWS Certified SysOps Administrator - Associate (SOA) - June 19th 2019 - June 19th 2022

AWS Knowledge - Amazon EKS - August 2024