Alexander Fortin

Work experience

• Special Circumstances Ltd

  January 2017 - current

  Freelancer

  I founded Special Circumstances to be free to offer the best of the expertise I gathered so far in my career, anywhere, to any firm in the world.

  Special Circumstances coaches and supports teams and firms on a wide variety of important tasks that constantly challenge the modern IT industry, like:

  • choose right tools and Cloud providers
  • how to migrate from/to the Cloud strategies
  • Infrastructure as Code setup and refactoring
  • extend system automation to free operators from toil
  • gather visibility over KPIs through telemetry
  • unit + integration + E2E test and code review workflows via Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery pipelines
  • Serverless architectures and dev environment (local and remote) setups
  • SPA applications leveraging modern technologies like reactive/responsive web frameworks and JAMStack
  • planning and execution of deliverable (build) deploys, dataset migrations, middleware major version upgrades, etc.
  • Monolith vs. Micro-services strategy analysis
  • (virtual) network layout design
  • …and more

  Keeping everything secure and usable by both end users and operators is our most dear core value.

• Bonial International GmbH

  Berlin (Germany)

  July 2013 - December 2016

  Senior System Engineer

  Bonial, multinational business in the publishing field, was looking for someone willing to embrace the challenge of refactoring their relatively big Puppet codebase, all while expanding their operations. I was eager to get onboard and test my skills on a new scale (thousand of servers).

  I happily joined the Operations team as team lead and put in charge of the overall infrastructure stability, robustness and maintainability, enforcing best operational practices.

  In my years at Bonial I witnessed first hand the IT department and especially the Operations team exponential growth. We regularly faced interesting new challenges, some of them planned, like cloud providers migrations (from Rackspace to AWS), some of them unexpected and frantic, like embracing the new micro-services paradigm, which in itself put an incredible amount of new goals and responsibilities on my team.

  As the new way took off more and more, we gradually abandoned self managed hosts (and Puppet with them) moving towards cloud services. Terraform was our tool of choice to help us manage at best our multi-account, multi-region AWS setup. We decided to implement internally our Terraform orchestrator to better integrate with our CI/CD pipeline, react to failures, and enforce good coding practices.

  The technological stack:

  • AWS / Rackspace cloud
  • Debian GNU/Linux
  • Ganeti virtualization
  • Docker
  • Terraform
  • Puppet
  • Icinga
  • Apache web server
  • Tomcat/JVM
  • PostgreSQL
  • Python automation with Fabric and Boto libraries
  • Jenkins
  • Gerrit
  • Datadog
  • OpenLDAP
  • data confidentiality with LUKS

• Spreaker

  Italy / Germany / USA

  October 2011 - June 2013

  Senior System Engineer

  Technical operations lead, in charge of the infrastructure (mostly AWS based) overall stability and scalability. Responsible for the constant improvement of transparency and visibility (via logging and monitoring), and maintainability of the platform (via config management/automation).

  I took over all the things operations and gradually worked to introduce new tools and practices following the DevOps principles. Upgraded config management from internally developed Bash-based system to a Puppet-based one. Added visibility and telemetry with Zenoss Core and ELK stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana).

  The above effort enabled the infrastructure to sustain a fast grow that eventually brought us to the 1 million users target and above.

  The technological stack:

  • AWS
  • Puppet
  • Vagrant
  • PHP-FPM
  • Nginx
  • RabbitMQ
  • Sensu
  • Zenoss Core
  • Python automation with Fabric and Boto libraries
  • PostgreSQL
  • Redis
  • Graphite/Carbon
  • StatsD
  • Logstash
  • Elasticsearch
  • Kibana
  • MongoDB
  • SphinxSearch

• Devsum

  Brescia (Italy)

  October 2010 - December 2013

  Co-founder

  Architect, design, expand, deploy and monitor systems and networks infrastructures (internal and for customers), coordinate and lead services and software deployment, select and decide technical strategies and new technologies to adopt, support sales and marketing decision making.

  The technological stack:

  • GNU/Linux
  • FreeBSD
  • Puppet
  • vTiger CRM
  • Apache web server
  • Monit
  • Munin
  • OpenSSH
  • OpenVPN
  • Samba
  • firewalling with Iptables
  • BackupPC

• Studio Synthesis Srl

  Brescia (Italy)

  February 2008 - September 2010

  System Engineer

  Architect, design, deploy and monitor cloud infrastructures (both public and private) for business intelligence services, monitor local physical systems (mostly Linux) and networks, monitor and manage on-site physical systems and networks for customers, contribute to develop PHP modules for vTiger CRM open source software.

  The technological stack:

  • GNU/Linux
  • Windows Server
  • TrueCrypt
  • firewalling with Iptables
  • PHP-FPM
  • vTigerCRM
  • Apache web server
  • Bind
  • Pentaho BI
  • Asterisk PBX

• Informed Technology Pty. Ltd

  Perth (Western Australia)

  April 2007 - January 2008

  System Engineer

  Manage and monitor the overall behavior of the internal network, including backups/restores, add new services, deploy new systems, keep systems updated, provide support for corporate customers, help desk support for dial-up customers, racks/patch panels wirings maintenance.

  The technological stack:

  • Solaris and Linux
  • OpenSSH
  • rsync
  • stunnel
  • Bacula
  • OpenLDAP
  • Iptables
  • Sendmail
  • Cyrus-IMAP
  • Apache web server
  • BIND

• Turboden Srl

  Brescia (Italy)

  October 2004 - March 2007

  System Engineer

  Project, establish, test and manage the Internet and Intranet e-mail service. Improve security deploying a new Linux-based firewall, beside ordinary system administration tasks for Linux-based servers in the network.

  The technological stack:

  • Postfix
  • Dovecot
  • Spamassassin
  • Iptables
  • OpenSSH
  • OpenVPN

• Assyrus Srl

  Brescia (Italy)

  June 2004 - September 2004

  System Administrator

  Study, develop and deploy an anti-spam system based upon Linux, Postfix and Spamassassin

• Editoriale Teletutto Bresciasette Srl

  Brescia (Italy)

  June 1998 - January 2007

  TV Technician

  Manage and operate a wide range of media players, including audio/video mixers, RVM players and recorders, non-linear editing software (Adobe Premiere, Sonic Foundry Vegas), embedded software for on-air playlists, audio-video switches, cameras, lights-mixers, wireless microphones, etc