Paul Durnien

United Kingdom · British · Open to contract and permanent roles, UK and beyond

Architecture	Hybrid and private cloud design, Solution scoping and requirements definition, Capacity planning, Rack, logical and network diagrams, Data centre procurement, Technical documentation, Confluence, JIRA
Platforms	Kubernetes, OpenShift/OCP/OKD, Helm, Rook/Ceph, Docker/Podman, Linux
DevOps Practices	GitOps/ArgoCD, IaC, CI/CD, Terraform, Jenkins, Git
Automation, Configuration Management & Platform Build	Ansible / AWX, Puppet, Foreman / Katello / Satellite, Bash / ZSH, YAML, SQL
Linux & Virtualisation	RHEL, Rocky Linux, CentOS, Debian / Ubuntu, SELinux, VMware vSphere, 20+ years of Linux and UNIX
Networking	Cisco, Juniper, Unifi, pfSense / OPNsense, BGP, OSPF, VPN, iptables / netfilter, tcpdump / Wireshark, DNS, NGINX, Apache
Security	PKI, CA, OpenSCAP, Linux hardening, Audit and accounting, FreeIPA / LDAP, Active Directory
Design and Deploy Monitoring / Asset	Prometheus, Grafana, CheckMK, Nagios, NetBox, ServiceNow, Salesforce, HP Service Manager / CMDB

Experience

2022 – present

Designing and delivering on-prem and hybrid Kubernetes platforms for large regulated customers.

Delivered an OKD-based private cloud for a large regulated programme, converting legacy applications to containers and migrating the whole service onto the new platform. The work involved distributed storage, demanding network requirements and a complex cut-over.
Designed and built the platform on bare metal in an air-gapped environment, resolving the platform's many dependencies without internet access.
Designed the storage architecture: deployed Ceph with Rook and integrated the customer's existing NetApp volumes.
Implemented a GitOps-driven architecture with ArgoCD, so platform and application configuration is declarative and version-controlled.
Designed and deployed Foreman for automated PXE provisioning of bare-metal builds.
Built an Ansible framework covering the entire project for automated deployment and configuration management.
Supported a customer's PKI deployments at scale, delivering automation to remove manual steps.
Designed, deployed and led the replacement of an ageing Nagios estate with CheckMK.
Drive a cloud-by-default approach so applications can move between on-prem and public cloud.
Advise customers and project managers on priorities and progress, and mentor and support colleagues.

2013 – 2022

Independent contractor through my own IT consultancy (sole director), delivering in secure, highly technical environments. Client names withheld.

On a project running on RHEL systems (2013 to 2018): introduced Puppet Enterprise to bring configuration management to the estate.
Replaced custom monitoring scripts with Nagios-based monitoring platforms.
Managed a growing VM estate and procured Dell VRTX clusters chosen to fit the customer's requirements.
Supported the customer's application and development teams, including XSLT.
Bare-metal provisioning and new system architecture (2018 to 2021): led the introduction of Foreman provisioning with PXE for automated bare-metal builds.
Integrated a Puppet server with Foreman and designed structured yaml data for consistent, maintainable configuration.
Instrumental in the architecture design of a new system to the customer's requirements.
Implemented storage build automation, and built automation in Ansible.

2011 – 2013

Large-team support of one of the biggest private networks in Europe.

2010 – 2011

Mission-critical UNIX, Solaris, VMware and Cisco infrastructure across UK, Canada and US teams.

2007 – 2010

UK member of a US team.