Don Alarms

• Own end-to-end CI/CD strategy for multiple data and platform teams, standardizing GitHub Actions reusable workflows (build, test, security scan, deploy) that cut average pipeline duration by ~45% and reduced failed deployments due to misconfiguration by over 50%. • Built production-grade AWS infrastructure using Terraform modules (VPC, ECS services, ECR, RDS, security groups, ALBs), enabling consistent, repeatable environment provisioning across dev, test, staging, and prod without manual console operations. • Implemented a DevSecOps toolchain integrating Trivy, SonarQube, and dependency scanning into pipelines, shifting security left and preventing vulnerable images and libraries from reaching production; improved security defect detection in pre-prod stages by 35%+ quarter-over-quarter. • Collaborated with platform, SRE, and application teams to containerize legacy workloads using Docker and Kubernetes, tuning resource requests/limits and autoscaling policies to improve cluster utilization while maintaining SLOs for latency and availability. • Enhanced observability by wiring application and infrastructure metrics into Prometheus and Grafana and correlating them with CloudWatch logs, which reduced Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) and Mean Time to Recover (MTTR) for priority incidents by an estimated 30%. • Designed and tested backup, restore, and disaster recovery procedures for critical RDS and S3 data, including cross-region replication, point-in-time recovery, and DR runbooks, ensuring business continuity targets and RPO/RTO objectives were consistently met. • Partnered with InfoSec and Compliance teams to implement IAM guardrails, tagging standards, and encryption policies (KMS, TLS in transit, SSE at rest) supporting SOC 2 and GDPR audit requirements without slowing delivery teams.

• Led the organizational shift from legacy CI/CD tooling to GitHub Actions, designing reusable pipeline templates and composite actions that standardized build, test, security, and deployment flows across 15+ applications and reduced manual release effort by 55% (from ~45 minutes to ~20 minutes per release). • Hardened the container supply chain by running Trivy scans on 15+ critical Docker images, enforcing minimum security baselines and blocking images with high-severity vulnerabilities, which drove down high-severity findings by ~40% before images reached Amazon ECR. • Architected highly available, fault-tolerant AWS environments with multi-region deployments using Route 53, S3 cross-region replication, and RDS read replicas, improving resiliency to regional outages and supporting global low-latency access for key workloads. • Contributed to disaster recovery and business continuity planning by automating infrastructure recreation with CloudFormation and Terraform, implementing scheduled cross-region backups, and participating in regular DR drills to validate recovery runbooks and data integrity. • Managed Terraform state and modular infrastructure definitions across three non-production environments, introducing remote state backends and state locking to prevent drift and collisions between concurrent changes from multiple teams. • Introduced Chaos Engineering practices into CI/CD pipelines by running controlled failure injection tests (instance termination, latency injection, dependency outages) to validate resilience patterns; used results to tune autoscaling, circuit breakers, and retry strategies. • Integrated automated unit and integration test frameworks (e.g., JUnit and service-level tests) into pipelines, enforcing quality gates and reducing manual regression testing effort while increasing confidence in frequent deployments. •

VPCs, EC2, RDS, and ALBs; the migration reduced annual infrastructure costs by an estimated 30% (>$150K) and enabled 4x scalability during seasonal traffic spikes. • Designed and maintained highly available architectures using Auto Scaling Groups and Application Load Balancers, instrumented with health checks and scaling policies that consistently delivered 99.99% uptime for core external-facing APIs. • Built and managed 10+ AWS VPC environments with carefully scoped subnets, route tables, NACLs, and security groups, applying least-privilege networking principles to isolate workloads by environment and sensitivity. • Automated 70% of the manual deployment process through parameterized Jenkins pipelines integrated with Git, Maven, and Tomcat, enabling repeatable zero-touch deployments and reducing release-related human error. • Implemented secure, immutable storage patterns using S3 with versioning, lifecycle policies, and IAM roles for applications, fully eliminating the use of hard-coded credentials in code repositories and configuration files. • Integrated static code analysis and container scanning into CI/CD workflows, ensuring application and image quality before promotion to staging and production environments and aligning with internal DevSecOps standards. • Tuned CloudWatch metrics, dashboards, and alarms to cover latency, error rates, and capacity, allowing early detection of anomalies and faster triage of incidents by both Ops and development teams. • Mentored two junior engineers on Terraform module design, Jenkinsfile best practices, and AWS fundamentals, increasing the team’s automation throughput by roughly 25% and reducing reliance on senior staff for routine tasks.

• Developed and maintained 40+ Ansible playbooks and roles to automate OS configuration, middleware setup, and patching for large RHEL and Windows Server fleets, achieving roughly 85% configuration consistency across environments. • Deployed resilient web server clusters on EC2 using Auto Scaling and ALBs, tuning scaling thresholds and health checks to maintain high availability during traffic peaks and planned marketing campaigns. • Strengthened cloud security posture by managing IAM users, groups, and roles, enforcing MFA, and implementing least-privilege policies across AWS accounts; worked closely with security teams to align with internal standards and external compliance expectations. • Expanded observability by creating 50+ CloudWatch alarms and dashboards for key application and infrastructure metrics and later integrating with Grafana for richer visualization, which contributed to a 35% reduction in MTTD for production incidents. • Optimized Docker images by refactoring to multi-stage builds, reducing image sizes by ~45% and improving container startup times by about 25%, which translated into faster scaling and reduced storage and network overhead. • Supported containerized workloads on ECS and Kubernetes clusters, collaborating with developers on logging, health checks, and resource limits to improve performance predictability and stability. • Documented runbooks, standard operating procedures, and deployment guides in Confluence, reducing onboarding time for new team members and standardizing support practices across shifts.

• Led a pilot migration of five critical legacy servers to AWS, coordinating cutover planning, DNS changes, and validation to achieve 100% successful migration with zero customer-visible downtime. • Established foundational AWS network topology by designing VPCs, subnets, and security groups and provisioning EFS for shared storage in stateful applications, enabling consistent patterns for subsequent migrations. • Assisted in administering EC2, EBS, and RDS resources, handling regular patching, backup checks, and capacity reviews to maintain performance and reliability targets. • Created basic automation scripts in Bash and Python to streamline routine operational tasks such as log rotation, snapshot management, and instance health checks.

Bachelor’s Degree in Accounting Piedmont College, Demorest, GA, USA Certifications: - AWS Solutions Architect Associate - PCNSE (Palo Alto Networks Certified Network Security Engineer) - Oracle Certified Database Administrator