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Zero Clicks provide contract UK-based AWS and DevOps consultancy to organizations of different sizes and in multiple verticals.
We bring our experience to your team and help work through any issues or projects you need support with.
As an expert in both AWS and DevOps practices, Zero Clicks can both help transform your infrastructure, as well as shape your team by implementing an AGILE DevOps methodology to your workflow.
Previous Engagements
DevOps Lead at Belron International
SEP 2022 - MAR 2023
Belron is the parent company of AutoGlass (UK), Carglass (EU), and Safelite (US). They are underway with digital transformation programme, targetting improvements at both internal and externally-facing systems.
Zero Clicks were retained to create a greenfield cloud platform that allows the Enterprise Web teams to rapidly prototype and deploy the marketing sites for the various Belron brands, and their new online booking engine.
Key deliverables for this engagement include:
Provisioning new AWS accounts and networking aligned to the well-architected framework.
Deploying auto-scaling GitLab Runners to run CI/CD.
Defining infrastructure best practices, IaC patterns, and pipeline standards.
Creating Kubernetes (EKS) clusters using Terraform.
Automating all deployments with Helm and GitLab CI.
Implementing pre-merge Review Apps to allow rapid prototyping of features.
Adding monitoring and observability capabilities using ELK, Prometheus, Jaeger, and some custom tooling.
Providing alerting and visualisation of operational SLAs and SLOs in Grafana.
Lead Cloud Architect at AND Digital
APR 2022 - SEP 2022
AND Digital are an IT consultancy, primarily focussing on software development, but recently added a specialist public cloud business unit to their portfolio.
This engagement through AND Digital was for a client operating in the defence intelligence space to establish foundational cloud patterns and architectures as they migrate into AWS; as well a helping to shape AND's own cloud practice.
This involved:
Leading a team of 5 AND engineers to implement cloud foundations.
Establishing IaC patterns and standardised deployment pipelines using Azure DevOps.
Architecting core AWS services for deployment as Terraform modules or via CloudFormation StackSets.
Configuring AWS Organizations for centralised governance and auditing.
Implementing centralised AWS Backup for "beyond reach" backup storage, and standardised backup policies.
Architecting and configuring an observability stack including ELK, InfluxDB, and Grafana.
Architecting and implementing a hub-and-spoke network topology in AWS using Transit Gateway.
Ensuring all cloud resources were secured and protected aligned to defence sector requirements.
Working closely with AWS on partnership activities.
Principal Engineer (AWS) at ANS Group
MAR 2021 - APR 2022
We were engaged to shape the AWS DevOps practice at ANS Group (formerly UKFast). ANS provides consultancy and MSP-style services in the cloud, which necessitated a significant degree of standardisation to ensure solutions were supportable long-term.
During the engagement, the team grew from 4 to 10 people, and divisional revenues increased by over 400%.
This engagement covered the following duties:
Discovery, design and planning of solutions for customers.
Building out internal IaC and code standards across Terraform, CloudFormation, Ansible, Bash, and PowerShell.
Building repeatable patterns across a number of technologies to suit different types of customers.
Implementing project management and Agile (SCRUM) working practises into the team to manage workloads.
Performing Well-Architected Reviews and consultancy for customers.
Overseeing end-to-end greenfield public cloud migrations into AWS from on-premise and other cloud suppliers.
Managing a large multi-tenanted set of AWS Organizations under the Solution Provider Program.
Cost optimization from both an MSP/Partner and customer perspective.
Achieved the AWS Migration Competency (MAP), AWS Well-Architected Competency, and on the way to achieving the AWS MSP Competency.
Technical Lead (AWS) at ClearCloud
NOV 2020 - MAR 2021
After UKFast acquired ClearCloud to complement their existing on-premise MSP services with public cloud consultancy, Zero Clicks were retained to provide leadership to the team and support the integration of the two businesses.
This engagement included:
Integration of ClearCloud into UKFast.
Product owner for public cloud services within UKFast.
Discovery, design and planning of solutions for customers.
Building out internal IaC and code standards across Terraform, CloudFormation, Ansible, Bash, and PowerShell.
Building repeatable patterns across a number of technologies to suit different types of customers.
Implementing project management and Agile (SCRUM) working practises into the team to manage workloads.
Cost optimization from both an MSP/Partner and customer perspective.
Overseeing end-to-end greenfield public cloud migrations into AWS from on-premise and other cloud suppliers.
Senior DevOps Consultant at ClearCloud
NOV 2019 - NOV 2020
We were engaged by ClearCloud to complete an AWS cloud transformation for one of their largest clients who provide a mobile workforce management system.
The end-client estate was made up of a mixture of Windows servers running .NET applications, and Linux infrastructure running .NET Core and PHP applications - along with peripheral services.
This involved:
Brownfield deployments into existing AWS accounts, implementing CloudFormation for transformed workloads.
Implementing CI/CD pipelines for IaC, workloads, and AMIs in Azure DevOps and AWS CodeDeploy.
Configuration management with Ansible, Bash, and PowerShell.
A mixture of EC2 ASGs and ECS Fargate were deployed, along with MSSQL Always-On Cluster running on EC2 (due to some RDS limitations).
Senior DevOps Consultant at Burberry
APR 2019 - NOV 2019
This engagement focussed on improving processes and simplifying the architecture of their existing AWS and GCP infrastructure to increase availability and reduce costs through rightsizing.
Core responsibilities:
Ownership over their AWS and GCP estates - running EC2, ECS, SQS, RDS, GKE (Kubernetes), ActiveMQ, Elasticsearch (ELK) on EC2, GitLab.
Defining Terraform standards, and working to retroactively implement IaC throughout the estate.
Implementing CI/CD pipelines using both Jenkins and GitLab CI.
Operational responsibility for Brocade Stringray LBs, PingFederate SSO and integrations along with other internal systems.
Configuration of Akamai CDN and HLS/RTMP streaming services.
Centralising routing in AWS using Transit Gateway.
Enterprise Linux Systems Administrator at UKFast
OCT 2015 - MAY 2019
Working directly with UKFast's largest clients to ensure smooth day-to-day operation of their solution, and supported customers with any P1 and P2 incidents.
This engagement was varied, but some highlights include:
Building, configuring, and maintaining an in-house ECMP-anycast DDOS protection platform using NGINX, ModSec, and OpenResty.
Building and maintaining clustered services running over three sites for HA and DR.
Galera clustering, MongoDB replica sets, Elasticsearch, Redis cluster, DRBD, NFS.
Extensive use of Varnish, NGINX, HAProxy, Apache.
Pacemaker / CRM clustering, and RHCS (Ricci+Luci) clustering.
Working with one of the largest Cisco UCS VMWare deployments in the UK, along with Hyper-V, Proxmox, and OpenStack private clouds.
Maintaining a 20TB+ ELK stack for internal logging.
On-call duties, including execution of DR plans.
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