Andrew Milam's Portfolio

About Me

Experienced IT professional who has assumed many different positions, from Help Desk and Tier 2 Support to the current role as a DevOps Engineer that creates scalable Cloud Solutions through Infrastructure-as-Code. Has been involved in several notable methodology/tech/cultural shifts, such as: an Enterprise DevOps Implementation, Scaled Agile Framework adoption for 20+ globally distributed development teams, and an Enterprise cloud adoption/migration for a large scale healthcare application with ~100 microservices. Passionate about designing and implementing monitoring-at-scale solutions that enable companies to create and maintain more reliable applications and infrastructure.

Work Experience

DevOps Engineer- DaVita Kidney Care (April 2021 - Present)

Designed, developed, and maintained various Cloud Monitoring Terraform modules that deployed standardized resources to ensure every Cloud solution had the resources required to be more reliable, easier to maintain, and had the data necessary to provide quick and impactful enhancements
Created custom monitoring and auto-healing solutions for GKE (Google Kubernetes Engine) clusters and related services
Designed Cloud based serverless functions and messaging queue solutions (PubSub) to manage the flow of incidents from Cloud resources to on-call support systems located in an on-prem data center
Designed and maintained various implementations of shared APIs that allowed teams manage everything as code, examples include: Gitlab, Consul, Arifactory, and Vault.
Produced Architectural Documents to be digested by downstream consumers to allow for the easy use and implementation of various Cloud solutions
Created pipeline monitoring solution to capture Terraform and CICD errors during pipeline runs to address systemic problems in Terraform code and within Gitlab CICD templates
Mentored teams across the enterprise to help bring the entire organization into the DevOps space

Site Reliability Engineer - DaVita Kidney Care (Jan 2020 - April 2021)

Architected and built Cloud resources in GCP as code using Terraform pipelines in Gitlab
Collaborated with cloud migration team to migrate Java microservices from on-prem Docker Data Center to GKE in Google Cloud
Designed and instrumented monitoring for various enterprise applications and microservices, including 100+ SpringBoot Microservices, Kafa, Cassandra, and ELK stack
Instrumented monitoring and provided operational support for Hybrid Cloud and Multiplatform resources including Docker Data Center, Vanilla Kubernetes, Anthos, and GKE
Administered and maintained various Kubernetes platforms (Anthos/Vanilla/GKE)
Designed an array of Prometheus operator deployments serving up metrics for all Kubernetes resources across all various k8s flavors
Defined SLIs/SLOs and created error budgets
Served as rotational on call support following SRE guidelines set by Google
Worked to evangelize SRE principles across the entire organization in order to make a wider impact and help other teams achieve more reliable systems
Designed Program wide monitoring solutions for Cloud Resources and created framework for managing monitoring as code through Gitlab pipelines
Cross-trained teams across DaVita in DevOps principles, GCP, GitOps, Terraform, and Gitlab

Atlassian Tools Administrator and Developer - DaVita Kidney Care (Aug 2017 - Jan 2019)

Worked as an Atlassian Administrator/Developer on a Release Train Engineering Team.
Responsible for administering and extending Atlassian tools with a focus on implementing Scaled Agile practices for 20+ globally distributed Feature Teams.
Attended PI Planning ceremonies and assisted with any Program level changes in app to align with new Program changes being implemented.
Regularly assisted with requirements process improvements, development team agility, and portfolio level prioritization.

Atlassian Tools and Systems Administrator - Self Employed (July 2016 - July 2017)

Private Atlassian tools consultant.

Atlassian Administrator and Release Engineer - Tractor Supply Company (July 2015 - July 2016)

Responsible for Atlassian administration (JIRA, Confluence, Fisheye, and Crucible), Talend Administration, and RedHat administration.
Other duties included release management, migrating code/jobs in-between environments using Talend Open Studio, resolving job component issues in Talend jobs, and attending Change Advisory Board meetings for Production migration approvals.
Achieved the Integration Employee of the Year 2015
Technologies supported: JIRA, Confluence, Fisheye, Crucible, Talend, Linux, Windows, Data Integrator, Oracle, Toad, Aqua Data Studio, Atlassian SDK

Tier 2 IT Support Technician - Tractor Supply Copany (May 2014 - July 2015)

Responsible for migrating users over to new laptops, migrating profiles, managing active directory accounts/access/privileges, and networking issues.

Computer Systems Coordinator - Cruiser Customizing, Inc. (Jan 2012 - May 2014)

Responsible for managing the entire distribution center for Cruiser Customizing, network administration, end user support, desktop administration, device support, and remote terminal server management at HQ in California, and user access

My GitHub

Skills

Basic coverage of some of my top skills.

Architecting With GCPExpert

Prometheus StackExpert

TerraformExpert

KubernetesPro

Recommendations

Working with Andrew, and watching his career growth, is an absolute pleasure. He always has a positive can-do attitude, and an abundance of energy to get the job done right.

He is a motivated and talented engineer with a thirst for knowledge. When the team was offered Google Cloud Platform training opportunities, he jumped at the chance, took the classes, setup team study sessions, studied hard, and was one of the first in the organization to get his Professional Cloud Architect certification. He then wasted no time putting this new found knowledge into use by architecting our GCP monitoring solutions.

Along with his deep understanding of the tech stack at DaVita, he has excellent working relationships with many teams across the IT organization, from Operations and Infrastructure to the Developers. He's always available to share his knowledge, mentor, and help other engineers and teammates in the organization's challenges.

I would highly recommend Andrew for any team, and would happily work along side him on any project

Karyn Cassio
Senior Consultant at Red Hat

I worked on the same team as Andrew for 2 years. Andrew is an incredible technologist, mentor, and person to be around in general. He digs and researches through even the most arcane tech stack until he has a full understanding. He became the SME on our team for more subjects than I can count.

Andrew’s ability to organize and communicate with discrete groups is second to none. I feel like I got a master’s degree level education in cross-organizational communication from working with him. Any DevOps team would be improved by having Andrew as a member. He’s at the top of my list of people I’d like to work with again.

Logan Clemons
Cloud Engineer at Lirio

Andrew is one of the best team members I have ever had the opportunity to work with. He consistently showed up with initiative and an unending thirst for learning. He is an innovative thinker, always asking himself "What can I do better?". He takes clear ownership of his responsibilities and brings a passion to his work that is rarely paralleled. if given the opportunity, I would hire him again, site unseen.

Jeremy Rice
Release Train Engineer at Scaled Agile, Inc.

Andrew Milam

Google Certified Professional Cloud Architect

DevOps Engineer @DaVita Kidney Care

About Me

Latest Projects

GKE kube-prometheus-stack Terraform Module

Google Counter Logging Metric Terraform Module

Google Distribution Logging Metric Terraform Module

Grafana Dashboards Terraform Module

Helm Chart Repository

Portfolio Website Hosted Via Google Cloud Run (this website!)