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Pets at Home Group

Employment Duration

Start Date End Date
January 24, 2022 Current

Seniority level

  • Employee

Job Title

  • DevOps Engineer

Job responsibilities

Placed in the PCAG (Pet care analytic group) as the first GCP Devops Engineer, to help build the practice and ensure best practices are being followed

  • Playing Cloud Archeologist when onboarded to understand the overall platform
  • Building out the DevOps practice from scratch
  • Terraform importing the entire platform in to a repo
  • Managing Analytics Deployments (Airflow)
  • Re-architecting Terraform in to different directories and systems
  • Building modules to allow for easier piece meal deployments
  • Terraforming IAM
  • Migrating team from BitBucket to GitHub
  • Vetting CI Vendors and opensource offerings
  • Re-writing all BitBucket pipelines to GitHub actions
  • Configuring Workload Identity Federation for GitHub actions
  • Writing CI pipeline that nets us £6m a year
  • First ever Kubernetes Deployment at Pets at Home
  • Vetting Observability tools (DataDog)
  • Birth of the Terraform Monorepo
  • CI for user request-able resources (Buckets, BQ Data sets)
  • Cost Savings

Wins

Note, it's not that I don't have daily wins, I just forget to update this

Date Description
February 2022 Suggested a new jira template, implemented the day after on a board
February 2022 Located an issue with Composer and escalated to Google
March 2022 Suggested we use Architecture Decision records and since been adopted by DevOps
March 2022 Started writing project kickoff documents and since been adopted
March 2022 Started writing documentation on new deployments, which has helped handing off work to colleagues
May 2022 Created helm chart with IAP enabled for cloud deployment
May 2022 Created private GKE cluster with Workload identity enabled for namespace
June 2022 Took over deployment that was stuck in the mud for 3 months. Completed it in a few weeks
June 2022 Called out for writing good documentation for applications
September 2022 Deployed Internal app to production with no downtime
September 2022 Spearheaded GKE for Pets at Home building POC cluster and getting green light for prod
October 2022 First Dev GKE cluster running a workload
December 2022 Created terraform mono-repo and imported all gcp projects in to it and used terragrunt
January 2023 Redefined how we use terraform remote state, updated IAM and created better module and documentation
February 2023 Moved repos in to GitHub and built on deployment strategy
March 2023 Ran research on CI Providers and settled on GitHub Actions
April 2023 Moved all CI to GitHub actions with Workload Identity Federation
June 2023 GKE Declared as stable enough to migrate all workloads in to it
July 2023 Data Engineering department using ADR system I created
July 2023 Designed system and implemented Just in time IAM for GCP
September 2023 Designed obscure CI pipeline for one of our busier repos
September 2023 Put the GCP org policies in to GitOps
October 2023 Integrated GCP Secret manager in to GKE natively

Notable projects

Transferable Skills

  • Kubernetes
  • Terraform
  • Helm
  • Complex deployments
  • Beautiful Documentation
  • Building an open culture
  • GitOps
  • Incident Management
  • GitHub Actions