Technical Portfolio

Matthew Field, BAIST

A whole-person platform & infrastructure engineer with a cross-org collaborative approach.

When I’m not finding ways to automate myself out of a job, I’m building tools for others to do the same and writing great docs.

I’m focused on Platform Engineering practices, software delivery, infrastructure automation & monitoring, and cross-organizational silo-busting.

In my off time, you’ll find me publishing music, spending quality time with my young family, reading a good book, or building SaaS side-projects.

I strive to nurture honest, high-trust relationships and bring my healthy, whole self to the remote workplace. I believe remote-first work can revolutionize the economy, family life, and the well-being of the workforce

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Things I’ve Engineered

Rudder

Full-stack internal platform tool — fleet-wide Kubernetes visibility and workflow automation. (closed source)

Rudder is the Infrastructure Engineering team’s “single pane of glass” for operating a fleet of 40+ Kubernetes clusters across AWS, GCP, OCI, and on-prem Canonical MaaS. It replaced an aging, under-supported Ansible AWX system with a Temporal-powered workflows-as-code engine, and surfaced a rich, searchable, filterable view of the entire cluster fleet for both Infrastructure and Platform development teams.

Visibility Infrastructure and service teams can explore fleet-wide cluster state: component versions, namespaces, worker pools with instance sizing and node counts (including ASG min/max), FluxCD team deployments, GPU availability, and more. Rudder validates user authentication and group membership against existing authn systems to dynamically render frontend components and control API endpoint access — so each team sees exactly what’s relevant to them.

Workflow Automation Infrastructure team members can execute management operations — cluster upgrades, cert rotations, and more — against any individual cluster or customizable target group, and monitor the progress and logs of all targets in real time. Temporal workflows are defined in Golang and Python, keeping the team’s operational runbooks version-controlled, testable, and integrated into the same CI/CD toolchain as the rest of the platform.

Data Integration The Golang REST API talks to AWS, GCP, OCI, and MaaS APIs to effect CRUD operations, and to a suite of internal APIs to enrich and relate disparate data: users and groups, Kubernetes clusters, FluxCD state, compute and storage, and workflow execution. An AWS RDS PostgreSQL backend provides persistence without over-engineering.

Rudder Stack

  • NextJS frontend
  • Golang REST API
  • Temporal.io workflow orchestration & execution engine
  • PostgreSQL on AWS RDS

LaunchPad

Full-stack web application, CI/CD built and deployed to Azure Kubernetes Service.
(closed source)

A highly extendable GUI portal enables our developer and infrastructure teams to provision, monitor, & manage line-of-business application environments and other managed IT services. Built and hosted on Azure services, this project was an intentional effort to build web development skills alongside my existing infrastructure automation & cloud toolboxes and deliver significant value across our entire organization.

LaunchPad defines external services (disaster recovery, training, development environments, and the like), their properties, and actions in the form of API calls to arbitrary endpoints (e.g. Azure Functions, Automation Runbooks, Ansible Tower, Azure DevOps API). These disparate services and functions are exposed via a single documented API for the frontend (or other developers’ applications) to consume.

The VueJS front-end displays the self-service features to authenticated users (by Azure AD group), and sends user requests (get status of, deploy, modify, or delete a service instance) to the LaunchPad API.

Prometheus + Grafana scrape and display time-series metrics from both the in-application LaunchPad instrumentation and the Kubernetes API for full-stack monitoring and analysis by different user groups across the organization.

Elasticsearch + Kibana collect and centralize application-level APM and logs for ease of tracing and troubleshooting.

LaunchPad Stack
– VueJS + Bootstrap frontend
– Flask API backend
– Redis-backed job processing (pub/sub task queue with workers)
– PostgreSQL + SQLAlchemy backend
– Azure Active Directory SSO
– Python and Golang microservices

Delivery
– Azure DevOps Build and Deploy pipelines, triggered by git branch commits
– Built for and deployed to Kubernetes.
– Rancher for team use and ease-into-Kubernetes.
– ARM templates to describe or rebuild Azure Kubernetes Service, Azure a, and Azure Database for PostgreSQL resources.

Monitoring & Log Collection

I’ve initiated and am leading a DevOps practice driven initiative to:

  • Standardize metric format (OpenMetrics) and log format/location in our proprietary application stack (POSSE LMS), and
  • Help Application Development teams to integrate instrumentation for metrics exposure.
  • Architect & Build the Prometheus+Grafana and Elasticstack clusters to ingest and present the data.
  • Drive adoption of the system across the organization, working with Tech Leads and Product Owners to build role-based access and relevant views for each team.

Automation

Smaller “glue” tools using Azure Functions, Azure Automation Runbooks, CI/CD pipelines, and PowerShell. These are hooked together to automate various IT functions across our infrastructure and use cases.

Technical Competencies

Frontend
VueJS, jQuery, JS+TS
Flask microframework

Backend
Python, NodeJS, Golang
Flask APIs
ORM -> DB

Infrastructure
Kafka
Cassandra
Chef, Puppet
Spinakker
AWS + Azure
Kubernetes ecosystem
Prometheus + Grafana
Elasticstack

Work Experience

Systems Analyst II | Computronix
(2018 – Present)

LaunchPad design, development, deployment, and management (See above).

As a member of the Managed Services team, I participate in project and operational initiatives to support service delivery of our hosted product offerings and our internal developer resources and infrastructure.

Computronix offers POSSE, a SaaS solution for licensing, enforcement, and other business logic workflows to governmental clients across North America. We operate four datacenters and/or colocations across North America and are aggressively moving into Azure tenancies.

IT Infrastructure Support | College and Association of Registered Nurses of Alberta
(2017 – 2018)

  • Planned and implemented a QR-code asset management system using LANSweeper. Produced procedures to ensure the system remains up to date.
  • Deployed a network-based desktop imaging system, which improved our system onboarding and refresh time from a full day to a few hours.
  • Deployed DUO two-factor authentication with our SSL VPN, significantly improving our security posture around remote access.
  • Led a test pilot of Chef Server.