Justin Flowers

Justin Flowers

Software Developer

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About

Hi there! I'm Justin Flowers, a software developer hailing from Toronto, Ontario. My work is focused on site reliability engineering, automation, continuous integration, delivery pipelines, and performance optimization. My most recent experience is related to boostrapping cloud infrastructure with Terraform, Kubernetes, Helm, Istio, and Flux. I also have experience developing RESTful APIs in Python and Java.

My interests outside development are hiking, rock climbing, canoe trips, relearning to skateboard at 30, roguelikes, and teaching my old dog Daisy new tricks. Thru hiked the Appalachain Trail (3500+ KM) from Georgia to Maine in 2023.

Projects

Python Kubernetes Operator for Unified Game Env Standup

Designed and developed full codebase for a Python Kubernetes Operator to manage the deployment and configuration of game server environments. Based on configuration could deploy full dev, qa, and prod scale environments.

Full Terraform IaC for Prod Scale GKE Game Servers

Designed and developed full Terraform, Helm, and Flux IaC codebase to support prod grade GKE deployments. Full GKE cluster provisioning along with supporting VPCs and subnets.

Rancher K8s Full Provisioning and Deployment

Took over an undocumented prototype codebase to provision VMs for a Rancher deployment. Totally refactored the code to use Ansible modules rather than large script blocks.

Work Experience

DevOps Engineer - Game Hive (January 2021 - December 2023)

Developed cloud Kubernetes production infrastructure for game server back ends and business intelligence tools. Wrote standard Terraform code to provision new GKE clusters. Designed custom Terraform modules to standardize and simplify standing up new environments. Managed Kubernetes configuration through Flux. Developed Helm Charts for use in production deployments of game server back ends. Developed a custom Kubernetes Operator using the Python Kubernetes Operators Framework to simplify new environment standup. Installed and configured base services through Flux, including: Istio, Cert-Manager, Datadog, and Oauth2-Proxy. Performed zero downtime Istio upgrades in production environments. Created Datadog dashboards for monitoring service performance and status. Created automated Datadog alerts for tracking service issues in prod. Monitored health of production environments and responded to issues as necessary. Audited, identified, and implemented cost savings measures on AWS and GCP. Assisted in development of game server back end APIs in Python with Flask.Developed

DevOps Developer - Scotiabank (July 2019 - January 2021)

Aids in supporting a regulatory and compliance big data platform. Works closely with Jenkins, Ansible, Nifi, Kafka, Docker, K8s, Rancher. Designed and implemented NGINX load balancing strategy to support big data traffic volumes for Kafka, Elasticsearch, and other services. Configured, deployed Spark cluster and Minio on K8s. Integrated with HDFS cluster from Nifi. Took on, refactored, documented, and improved an Ansible code base to provision and deploy Rancher K8s clusters. Configured SSL, Kerberos, LDAP, and proxies for many of these systems.

Software Developer - NexJ Systems (May 2016 - July 2019)

Aids the performance, scalability, and reliability team by developing tools for centralizing metrics, methods of measuring and displaying tested metrics, and automating build, deployment, and testing processes of Java enterprise web application servers.

DevOps Research Assistant - Centre for Development of Open Technology (May 2015 - April 2016)

Worked in automation, continuous integration, backend programming, and system administration. Researched modern and well known open source solutions for companies in these areas. Specifically, aided in designing, implementing, and testing a fault injection framework written in Java for a larger CRM company. Additionally helped implement a log centralization system based on Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana.

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