Patrick M. Burke

Looking to to produce, maintain, and improve upon systems and automation processes that deliver reliable, repeatable, and scalable solutions. Using the mantra of “do the right thing.” Following the hierarchy of security, profit, then convenience there should be no shortcoming of enjoyable and stimulating problems to find in this world.

Experience

AT&T Cyber Security

Senior DevOps Engineer, December 2022 – September 2023

  • Led project of implementation of AWS regions that lacked feature support needed (Dubai and Singapore.) Global features were added.
  • Updated Terraform code for best practices and style guide for AWS, GCP, and Azure deployments.
  • Modernized outdated and unsupported image rollouts to VMWare, AWS, Azure. 
  • Advised then implemented uses of automation with Puppet and Ansible.
  • Modernized CI/CD platform from Bash and Python scripts to Atlassian Bamboo and GitHub.
  • Maintained and created CaC and pipelines using Java, bash, python and yaml from development environments up to production.

SimSpace, Corp.

Senior DevOps Engineer, June 2021 – November 2022

  • Refactored and condensed 100+ custom-written Puppet modules from version 4 to 7 (latest), including configuration manifests for 30 types of distinct systems
  • Designed and implemented multi-cloud-capable and multi-platform CI/CD processes for Virtual Machine and Container creation, versioning, and maintenance via GitLabCI.
  • Developed and evangelized team style guides for Puppet, Packer, Ansible, and GitlabCI.
  • Introduced team to docker standalone, docker swarm, and Kubernetes solutions.
  • Consulted and assisted the SRE team with the transition from bare metal Kubernetes to Amazon EKS (Fargate and EC2 hybrid.)
  • Plugged gaps in Infrastructure as code with Python or Bash scripts. 
  • Maintained monitoring solutions such as Prometheus, Data Dog, and Splunk

SiteSpect, Inc.

Senior Operations Engineer & Security Officer, March 2021 – June 2021

  • Implement technical controls and contribute to the design and enforcement of the PCI compliance program. Primary stakeholder and representative for PCI certification audits and vendor vulnerability scans.
  • Owned resolution of all internally-discovered and vendor-submitted security issues.
  • Implemented and maintained GitLab Runners to ease the development of Production, Python, and Bash by notifying the author if tests fail.

Senior Operations Engineer & Security Engineer, August 2019 – March 2021

  • Improved developer experience by enabling the creation of ephemeral environments that may be spun up by any user with no risk to other environments.
  • Performed upgrade of environments in 10 colocation facilities from Puppet 3.8 to Puppet 6 (stop-gap) and then to Puppet 7.5. Also included upgrading CentOS 6.10 to CentOS 7.9 Replaced ten Xen 6.1 hypervisors with 20 KVM hosts controlled by a central Ovirt node with NFS shared storage of 10 TrueNAS systems. Replaced 20 existing firewalls with a more modern solution.
  • Sole owner of platform and infrastructure security monitoring and alerts (responsible for remediation, and improvements).

Senior Systems Administrator, May 2014 – August 2019

  • Technical Team Lead for a team that went from three 9s to five 9s of uptime across all points of presence.
  • Wrote and released completely Puppet-controlled environments for Production, QA, and Development. 
  • Architected and built the company’s original production network for 10 collocation facilities. Designed and implemented network segmentation, limiting WAN surface area to only where required, plus a DMZ and internal network to improve security posture.
  • Leverage cloud platforms such as AWS, GCP, VMWare, and KVM (oVirt and ProxMox) to deliver novel platform implementations and support company infrastructure.

Systems Administrator, September 2013 – May 2014

  • Deployed and administered hundreds of physical and virtual servers in a globally distributed infrastructure across 10 physical points of presence via automated delivery and configuration of base OS (Linux via PXE boot) and Configuration Management (Puppet) for all system types (webservers, infrastructure databases, etc).
  • Led the effort to re-platform from the inherited legacy OS (Crux Linux) to CentOS.
  • Released and maintained services for the production environment including OpenLDAP, BIND9, OSSEC/WAZUH, HAProxy, SpaceWalk, GitLab, etc.
  • Administer Atlassian and Active Directory.

TechTarget, Inc.

Systems Administrator, April 2012 – September 2013

  • Contributor and maintainer of Puppet 2.7 repo for manifests and modules.
  • Administer environment with 150 physical servers.
  • Manage NIS, LDAP, and Active Directory authentication.
  • Supervised and trained three fellow administrators.
  • Maintained and wrote dozens of scripts to automate away toil.
  • Installed and maintained New Relic.
  • Production environment firefighting.
  • Maintained compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley requirements.

Keene Publishing Corp (Keene Sentinel), Inc.

Systems Administrator, July 2010 – April 2012

  • Sole Technical Contact for 100+ Organization.
  • Administer Active Directory with Exchange server.
  • Manage Cisco firewall and Untangle network monitor.
  • Routing Audits of hardware and software needs of newspaper.
  • Appointed to the company committee tasked with changing the publishing platform.
  • 100% success rate of paper being published under tenure.

Kennedy Information, LLC

Systems Administrator, July 2007 – May 2009

  • Technical Support for Desktop Users.
  • Administer Active Directory Domain and OpenSuse SAMBA file systems.