I am a veteran computer professional with the technical and communication skills to apply cutting-edge technology to any organization's bottom line. I offer the hardcore technical expertise of an old-school sysadmin and coder, combined with the business pragmatism of a startup veteran.
Backed by 20 years of Unix systems administation and automation.
Built from time-tested designs, with modern methodologies.
Achieved with dynamic routing, stateless apps, and distributed storage.
Medidata runs a large online software platform to manage clinical trials, and my team writes the tools that deploy and manage the platform, including the dozens of services from which its composed. We handle most of the mechanics of the product lifecycle, including staging environments, a rigorous validation process, production deployments, metrics, alerting, and security. We work closely with the individual service development teams, and agressively promote devops-style practices, both within the company and in our industry at large. We are currently rolling out a Docker-based development and deployment pipeline, integrating local workstation setup with deployments to Amazon Elastic Container Service.
At Aranetic we applied agile technical and business practices to reducing legal discovery costs. We made heavy use of test-driven-development, Amazon Web Services, a no-SQL document store, and Chef to build a rapidly-scalable document processing system. As a principal, I also performed marketing, sales, and other startup duties.
At this Nokia subsidiary, my team and I were ultimately responsible for the 24/7 uptime and support for several hundred high-profile mobile web properties for "no-compromise" entertainment industry clients, including NBC Universal, ABC, MTV, and Maxim. In the early days of AWS, we built a self-assembling, automatically-scaling EC2 cluster to drive NBC's 2008 Beijing Olympics mobile web site.
In this role, I was responsible for the constant uptime of the company's main application, and other systems, running across 60+ server computers in a dual-data center environment. I performed the full spectrum of sysadmin duties in the "pre-cloud" era: physical backups, network design, server provisioning, etc.
While working for Orad, I provided engineering support for real-time graphics clusters, applied mostly to virtual reality or broadcast television. In charge of all support activities for the US and Canadian customer base, I perfromed extensive field installation, support, and live demos for major corporate, government, and academic institutions.
Here are some recent programming projects.
Allows commands that require an SSH key to be run from within a Dockerfile, without leaving the key in the resulting image. More generally, enables the use of ephemeral secrets from within the Docker build context.
View DetailsA ruby gem that constructs a self-extracting archive, wrapped in a Bash script (or Windows batch script), for securely initializing cloud systems.
View DetailsAWS CloudFormation-driven tool that converts an existing single-root-disk EC2 AMI into an AMI that spans multiple EBS snapshots. Helps generate CIS security-compliant AMIs.
View DetailsThis software collects logs from all Docker containers running on a given host and forwards them to Amazon's Cloudwatch Logs service, with flexible, dynamic control of the individual stream and group names.
View DetailsI currently live in Marin County, California. However, I work for a New York-based firm.
It's easiest to reach me by email.
Email: benton@bentonroberts.com
Mobile: 646.783.9673