Resume

Barry Morrison

Systems Architect obsessed with efficiency.

Experience

Sr. Infrastructure Engineer and Team Lead at Truss – December 2019 - Present

TrussWorks is a consulting agency that helps develop software and infrastructure products by working with our partners in the commercial and government sectors.

  • Worked alongside a team of designers, product managers and software engineers to help large enterprise and government clients move off bare metal servers in traditional data centers into AWS. These are clients that are still following guidelines and “best practices” from the late 90’s to early 2000’s. It wasn’t just about doing, but teaching and guiding.
  • Using almost exclusively Terraform along with Terratest and Inspec processed in CI/CD pipelines to provide Infrastructure as Code best practices.
  • As a team lead, I ensure a happy and healthy team with regularly scheduled 1:1’s.
  • Worked alongside other team leads across the various practices to ensure alignment and awareness.
  • I’m an advocate for my team’s personal and professional growth, identifying strengths and growth edges to ensure success.

Site Reliability Engineer at HashiCorp – September 2018 - December 2019

  • Collaborated alongside a team of Site Reliability Engineers to help modernize the product that is now known today as Terraform Cloud.
  • Upgraded underlying system software, helped automate the deployment of the infrastructure.
  • Focused on observability was also a driving force as we prepared for a production launch, cleaning up logging, metrics, monitoring and alerting.
  • Also helped roll out HashiCorp’s first iteration of Incident Response in preparation for the go-live of Terraform Cloud. This early work was largely influenced by PagerDuty’s open source Incident Response guide.
  • Created a prototype written in Golang for an isolation environment based on QEMU/KVM for multi-tenancy for the execution of Terraform plans and applies.
  • Also worked alongside other Infrastructure Engineers and Security engineers to do early research and design on rearchitecting HashiCorp’s AWS infrastructure to adopt modern best practices around AWS Organizations and Accounts as well as Single Sign-on.

Systems Architect at Sauce Labs – May 2014 - August 2018

  • Maintained and troubleshot an environment providing over 900 Operating System/Browser combinations, including both desktop and mobile.
  • Guided future architecture decisions from both a hardware and software perspective to support a multi-data center, active/active geographically disperse global presence.
  • Created a repeatable, consistent environment by replacing legacy scripts with Ansible across all teams.
  • Replaced DNSmasq with an Ansible-driven highly-available ISC DHCP/BIND9 setup performing DHCP & DNS for internal cloud.
  • Decreased the time to provision bare metal from days to less than an hour.
  • Tended to various responsibilities as the Director of Ops from October 2016 to January 2017: responsible for technical Operations leadership.

Ops Engineer at Versal – April 2013 - May 2014

  • Ensured business stability by successfully managing hundreds of servers across 4 AWS Regions and their AZs.
  • Created a more reliable and repeatable infrastructure with Chef, migrated from Salt Stack.
  • Made colleagues happier and more productive with internal tooling for monitoring, application deployment, and automation using Python, Jenkins, and Fabric scripts.

Linux Systems Engineer at TiVo – October 2011 - April 2013

  • Monitored the availability and performance of the TiVo services and applications as well as the internal infrastructure.
  • Converted and re-wrote the existing NOC runbook from a Word document to Sphinx, improving incident response time.
  • Ensured system reliability by a controlled deployment of application updates, CentOS patches and HP Blade updates.
  • Created daily reports highlighting issues during the past 24 hours.

Sys Admin I / Sys Admin II at University of the Pacific – September 2007 - October 2011

  • Daily administration of production NetApp 6040 active/active cluster. Managed CIFS/NFS as well as iSCSI and FC SAN. Created and managed user and directory quotas for shares. Wrote a custom PowerShell script that shortened the time required to provision a LUN for VMware virtual machine usage. Managed cluster utilizing SATA, SAS and Fiber Channel disks. Racked/stacked and cabled all shelves in production environment. Upgraded Data ONTAP from 7.2.5.1 to 7.3.2 to get support for SAS shelves.
  • Replaced two tape-backup environments with a disk-based backup solution utilizing Data Domain hardware, eliminating tape completely. Utilized NetVault’s VTL and Symantec’s OST. Shortened the amount of time required for backup and restore operations. Replicated primary Data Domain to a secondary Data Domain at disaster recovery site providing off-site recovery and business compliance requirements.
  • Replaced a degraded Server 2003 print cluster with a highly available Server 2008 print cluster virtualized on VMware ESX, Implemented a development/testing environment and new policies for the installation of production drivers and printers to ensure quality of service for all users across campus.
  • Performed head swap upgrading a NetApp 270 to NetApp 2040 providing fault tolerance on the heads and increased performance and capacity for future growth.
  • Performed a non-disruptive upgrade of an active/active 6080 cluster from 7.2.5.1 to 7.3.2 as recommended by NetApp to provide better performance.
  • Completed testing/proof of concept of Server 2003 AD to Server 2008 R2 AD.
  • Assisted in the physical moving our Data Center.
  • Evaluated VMware View and Citrix Xen Desktop with HPBL490c servers. Evaluation also included PCoIP thin clients, as well as HP, Tegile and NetApp storage solutions.

IT Contractor (Self employed) – September 2006 - September 2007

  • Maintained my business’s profitability and my clients budgets in bounds by managing vendors and maintaining a close watch on industry developments.
  • Gave customers a competitive advantage by selecting the correct technologies for the customer and providing timely support.

Support Agent at Sitel – February 2006 - September 2006

  • Obtained a Sensitive Government Security Clearance to support the United States Postal Service.
  • Solved user problems rapidly with a 90% first call resolution using remote support tools and developing repeatable solutions and troubleshooting techniques.

Computer Tech at Southeast Mental Health Services – February 2003 - February 2006

  • Increased staff productivity by quickly resolving desktop support issues across 6 remote locations in a 250 square mile area of Southeast Colorado.
  • Deployed the company’s first internal and public website providing information regarding services to the surrounding communities as well as internal information and documentation for employees and board members.
  • Evaluated and made recommendation on new IT-related purchases to provide quality of service to staff as directed by the executive staff.