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Shalom Bhooshi

About Me

I do cloud infrastructures — making them work, work right, work well, work cheap — in that order!

This page here is a bit of a professional one-pager (for a 6-pager, see my CV .. and no I don’t work for Amazon).

Perhaps a little about what drives me as an engineer.

  • Production Engineering — SRE/CRE, (Sys|Infra)Ops, Automation, Problem Management
  • Cloud Engineering — Private/Public Cloud IaaS/PaaS design, IaC, Workload Migrations
  • Systems Development — UNIX/Linux, Python, Golang, Shell, Windows Core, PowerShell
  • DevOps — CI/CD + CT, Build & Release Engineering, Dev(Sec|Test)Ops, QA/QE
  • Ecosystems — Platforms, Bespoke Services, APIs & Integrations, Tooling

I’ve worked in various technology settings over 17 years – in content & web development, SOHO infrastrcture & networking, QA automation, systems admin & engineering, DevOps/SRE, cloud infra.

After university the first time, I tried my hand at programming but the appeal of web development didn’t take my fancy. I was more interested in the backends and the things behind the scenes that make things work — networking, virtualization & elastic capacity, self-service models, service oriented architectures, distributed & antifragile systems, etc. These didn’t have the modern labels we assign them today but being business enablers, their combined utility eluded all but the biggest companies in the pre-cloud era. Seeing cloud providers now package-up and commoditise these to the extent that players in every field are by default cloud-native is testament to a universal need for dependable infrastructure not just as a consumable but a platform. Yet cloud platforms offer more than just a means to offload complexity to the provider, their adoption shapes a necessary antifragility for consumers — engineering systems with this agency at the core, for continuous improvement, is my main professional interest.

I do DevOps but I’m mostly an infrastructure jack-of-all-trades and building and operating infrastructures is where my heart is — that makes me less of the AppOps kind and more of the SRE or PE (or insert trendy mot du jour here) type that is more interested in where RFCs 1918 or 6749 apply than what new javascript framework is going to change the world. Engineering systems -ilities is important for how well services run and fostering this quality in a business culture of closing/tightening loops has a natural side-effect of improved antifragility — the setting of I am inclined towards. I do however take a keen professional interest in and can apply myself in most “DevOps” areas along the pipeline e.g. proactive shift-left approaches to nipping production problems in the bud — right-sizing changes, CT-centric CI/CD, pipeline design, DevSecOps, rainy-day testing, etc.

When I am not busy in production I like engineer away “pothole problems” with code and contribute my part to better infrastructure state of play (I’d ❤️ if more of my work was open source). I am still a developer of sorts given my early career prologue with code and perhaps this defines what SREs are — tamers of systems using (mostly) software engineering principles. I am a keen proponent of Software-defined-everything and evangelize Infrastructure-as-Code to be the authority that controls all aspects of infrastructure.

Where required, I also play a part in the “hands-off” albeit instrumental work in this domain — systems analysis, solution & process design, architecture, agile delivery, tech culture, etc (some of these seem contra-agile but ask me why agile delivery in infra requires following a plan over responding to change).

Agile, software engineering, economics, experiental learning & continuous improvment — these are my elements in the endeavour of dependable and flexible infrastructures. ٩(⁎❛ᴗ❛⁎)۶