Technical Consultant and Platform Specialist

github

Emily Shepherd  • Peerlist

I performed an audit of all systems including: every instance, volume, security group, RDS instance, and DNS record. This resulted in an immediate saving of around $1500 per month, and I gave recommendations for longer term solutions for further cost savings.

AWS Audit

This project was to split up the monolith codebase into smaller micro services, and migrate the platform away from its traditional server stack, to a containerised solution, run on Docker Swarm. I was solely responsible for the planning and implementation of this, and I deployed it at the start of 2018 with no downtime. This has halved our running costs, over doubled the capacity, and made it much easier to deploy / test code changes.

Containerising partnermarketing.com

As part of my final year, I worked in a team of five undergraduates on a project given to us by ARM: to design and develop a complex proof-of-concept application for their new subthreshold M0+ processor, which is currently in development. We choose to build a device and develop an embedded Machine Learning algorithm, to recognise certain forms of exercise.

I was responsible for modelling the algorithm in Java, and then programming it in C, optimising its code and any required libraries to fit into the device’s tiny 8kB of memory. I successfully implemented a working system in just 4kB for both program code and runtime data, running at 106kHz. ARM was very happy with the results, with the project earning a first and my individual contribution was graded as joint-highest, awarding me 76%, a good first class grade.

Fourth Year Group Design Project

This open source contribution to GitLab imrpoves the way docker containers are built in Auto DevOps CI/CD jobs to use BitKit. This allows for much more rigorous (and perhaps most importantly) performant caching between builds and even allows you to cache Multi-Stage Docker builds.

GitLab Auto DevOps: BitKit Support

Ingress-Nginx is a widely used plugin for Kubernetes that allows the cluster to serve multiple HTTP sites at a time. This project aimed to refactor the way ingress-nginx determined the external hostname/ip of an ingress record, and how that state is synced into the Kubernetes API.

Ingress-Nginx: Refactor and bug fixes

CDN Manager is a k8s plugin that lets you create CDN Distributions right from within your cluster. It adds the concept of a "Distribution" resource which is automatically synced with CloudFront. You can also automatically create Distributions by annotating existing Ingress records.

Kubernetes Plugin: CDN Manager

For my third year at the University of Southampton, we were required to complete an individual research project over the course of the year. Mine was on the topic of distributed code review, specifically looking at building a tool on top of Git. For this, I achieved a mark of 81%, a very high first class grade. The paper for this is listed in the publications section below.