Resume

Table of Contents

Nicholas Kuechler

Strong full-stack web development skills, primarily with Python, Flask and Django.

Experience developing and working with APIs and microservices.

Experience with serverless architecture, design, and implementation.

Comfortable working with modern development tools and workflows.

Experience with AWS, Google, and OpenStack clouds.

Certifications

Certified OpenStack Administrator: Certificate ID#: COA-1600-0135-0100 Verify

Red Hat Certified Professional: Red Hat Certified System Administrator

Web Development

I have developed numerous online applications and sites – view my portfolio.

Current technologies and languages used:

  • Python
  • Django
  • Flask
  • MariaDB
  • AWS DynamoDB
  • AWS Lambda
  • HTML
  • WordPress
  • Hugo
  • Apache
  • Nginx
  • Gunicorn
  • Redis
  • Minor graphics design and manipulation

Previous technologies and langauges I have used in the past, but no longer actively use:

  • Ruby
  • Rails
  • PHP
  • MySQL
  • PostgreSQL
  • Perl
  • CGI
  • Drupal
  • Pelican
  • Jekyll
  • Memcached

Monitoring and Metrics

Elasticsearch

Deep experience with the ELK stack: Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana. I architected and deployed a 49 node Elasticsearch cluster powering many of the metrics and reports for Rackspace Public Cloud, as well as writing various Grok patterns for processing OpenStack logs.

I use Elasticsearch as a document data store for other data besides logs. For example, I’ve put data about our fleet of servers in to Elasticsearch so that I could visualize the massive amount of data using Kibana, in order to find outliers, anomalies, patterns, and to quickly and easily produce reports and metrics, using real and accurate data.

Monitoring

Deep experience with complex Nagios configurations including auto-generated configuration files, parent+child relationships, service dependencies, and NRPE agents, in both active and passive monitoring configurations.

Experience with Prometheus for monitoring, with a custom Alertmanager destination I created for a personal project to monitor performance of my web sites.

Metrics

Deep experience with Graphite and clustered graphite solutions. I architected and deployed a clustered graphite solution which handles millions of metrics for the Rackspace Cloud Servers product. I also created an enhancement for blueflood to allow me to send graphite metrics to Rackspace Metrics as a Service (blueflood).

Skilled in using graphite-web and Grafana to visualize data and generate reports.

Cloud Computing, Containers, and Virtualization

  • Deep experience with OpenStack: Nova, Swift, Glance, Keystone, Neutron, Cinder
  • Deep experience with Amazon AWS services: EC2, S3, Route53, Lambda, DynamoDB, API Gatweay, IAM
  • XenServer
  • XenClassic
  • VirtualBox
  • Docker / docker-compose
  • Kubernetes

Configuration Management

Experience with configuration management and related tools:

  • Ansible
  • Puppet
  • Salt
  • Hashicorp Terraform
  • AWS CloudFormation

Automation

I have developed an automation framework for remediation of alerts and issues. Nagios alerts are fed in to the automation framework and playbooks run to resolve the issues. Features include mass server auditing, storing statistics and metrics for analysis, different playbooks to solve various problems, and more.

Server Management

Deep knowledge and understanding of hardware maintenance, server setup, installation, networking, advanced configuration, and server migrations. I have performed numerous server migrations on both Linux/Unix and Windows servers. Migrations include moving all clients and their data, configuration settings, testing and verifying everything is correct – with zero downtime.

Operating Systems Experience: Linux (I’ve used most flavors, but primarily use Debian, CentOS, RedHat, Fedora, and Ubuntu), FreeBSD, Solaris, Windows 2012 Server, Windows 2008 Server, Windows 2003 Server, Windows 2000 Server, Windows NT4 Server.

Database Management

MySQL, MariaDB, Galera cluster, PostgreSQL and Microsoft SQL Servers: planning and deployment database servers and databases themselves. Extensive knowledge of creating and maintaining databases, backups, recovery, replication (master-slave, master-master) and database clusters.

Extensive knowledge of SQL language and developing complex SQL queries. I’ve written many SQL queries to generate reports and collect metrics. Knowledge, understanding, and use of joins and subqueries. Experience with ORM such as SQLAlchemy. Experince with normalizing SQL query results for use in other data analysis tools, such as in Elasticsearch and Kibana.

Networking

Experience configuring networks and networking and troubleshooting networking issues. Planned and installed LAN and WAN networking setups working for a datacenter in a carrier hotel and for an ISP.

Technologies:

  • Software-defined networking (SDN) with Open vSwitch (OVS), Nicira NVP, and AWS VPC,
  • Load Balancers: F5 BIG-IP, haproxy
  • Firewalls: Netscreen, iptables, pf, pfSense
  • Switches: Cisco Catalyst, Dell PowerConnect
  • Routers: Cisco and Linux/Unix
  • Wireless access points

Interests and Hobbies

  • Astronomy
  • Investing
  • Fitness
  • Cooking
  • Trivia
  • Reading
  • Gardening

Further information available upon request. Contact me for more information.