Profilbild von Christian Kappen AWS | Cloud | DevOps | Infrastructure Architecture aus Wachtberg

Christian Kappen

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Letztes Update: 23.10.2023

AWS | Cloud | DevOps | Infrastructure Architecture

Firma: Geek Cell GmbH
Abschluss: nicht angegeben
Stunden-/Tagessatz: anzeigen
Sprachkenntnisse: deutsch (Muttersprache) | englisch (verhandlungssicher)

Dateianlagen

CHRISTIAN-KAPPEN-GEEK-CELL-CV-JULY-2023_110723.pdf

Skills

Intro
Hi, I'm Christian and the Co-Founder of Geek Cell GmbH, a software and infrastructure consulting company. I have been working in the technology industry for over 23 years now and have worked on the biggest platforms like werkenntwen.de or Chefkoch.de in Germany. I am an expert in the field of distributed and scaling infrastructures with AWS. I love to solve complex migrations and support developers with expert CI/CD pipelines in their daily work.

Programming Languages
PHP, Bash, Python

Development Tools
Ant, Bamboo, CircleCI, Confluence, CodeCommit, CodePipeline, Docker + Docker Compose, Git, GitHub, Gitlab, Jira, Make, Maven, Minikube, PHP Unit, Subversion, TravisCI, Mercurial, Vagrant

Operations Tools
Ansible, Chef, ELK, Molecule, New Relic, Nomad, Packer, Puppet, Sonar-Cloud, Status Cake, Stormforger, Terraform, Terragrunt, Vault

Infrastructures
Amazon Web Services (AWS), Digital Ocean, Bare Metal

Infrastructure Components
Apache, Elastic Search, Kubernetes, MongoDB, Memcache, MySQL (Percona Cluster, MariaDB, RDS, Aurora), Nginx, PHP, ProxySQL, RabbitMQ, Redis,  Solr, Squid, Sphinx, Varnish

AWS Services
API Gateway, Autoscaling groups, Backup, Budgets. Cognito, Cloudfront, Cloudtrail, CodeCommit, CodeDeploy, CodePipeline, Control Tower, DynamoDB, EC2, ECR, ECS Margate, EFS, EKS, ElastiCache, ElasticSearch, Glacier, IAM, Image Builder, Kafka, KMS, Landing Zone, Lambda,  Load Balancer, MemoryDB, RDS, Route53, S3, SES, Secrets Manager, SNS, SSM, Snowball, VPC, VPN, WAF, Well architected framework

Operating Systems
Linux (Ubuntu, Debian, Alpine), Windows, macOS

Best practices
Blue-Green Deployment, Clean Code, Clean Coder, Clean Architect, Coding Standards, Continuous Integration/Deployment/Delivery, Design Patterns, Domain-Driven-Design, DRY principle, Immutable Server, KISS principle, Phoenix Server, REST, SOLID principles, Static code analysis, Test-Driven-Development, YAGNI principle

Methodologies
Kanban, Mob programming, Pair programming, Planning Poker, Scrum, User-Stories, XP (Extreme Programming)

Projekthistorie

11/2022 - 07/2023
Senior AWS Cloud Engineer
Cura4You GmbH (Pharma und Medizintechnik, 10-50 Mitarbeiter)

At Cura4You GmbH, the task was to create and operate the complete infrastructure from Scratch. This project involves working with medical data, so we had to pay very close attention to data security and data protection. In this project, several AWS ECS and AWS EKS Kubernetes clusters with many microservices were deployed. The Docker containers are identical to those for the local development environment. For this purpose, a Blue Green deployment was implemented with Github Actions in which automatic tests were also run on the production(!) environment in the pipeline. The entire infrastructure is continuously monitored with Datadog and monitored according to several regulations (e.g. BSI, PCI, ISO 27001) to ensure the highest security. Multiple AWS RDS Aurora clusters with MySQL 8.0 were used as databases and several AWS ElastiCache Redis Clusters. The entire infrastructure was developed using Terraform+Terragrunt and was also rolled out in an automated manner. A dev and staging environment was also provided for the developers and product owners. I also provided local development environments for frontend + backend developers.

Technologies used:
AWS, GitHub, Redis, Terraform, Terragrunt, ECS, Kubernetes, Alpine, MySQL, PHP 8, VueJS

10/2022 - 10/2022
Vacation
Private

Vacation with my children and girlfriend.

11/2021 - 10/2022
Senior AWS Cloud Engineer
PlanA Earth GmbH (Energie, Wasser und Umwelt, 50-250 Mitarbeiter)

At PlanA Earth, I was responsible for migrating the existing AWS infrastructure to a High Availability AWS infrastructure. The systems had grown over time, the staff changed and so no one could take care of the AWS infrastructure dedicatedly anymore. The development team needed support with the local development environment, as well as the CI/CD pipeline to roll out new code. At PlanA Earth, I implemented several blue-green deployment pipelines with Github actions and generally helped the team a lot to better leverage the opportunities that AWS offers. Several AWS RDS MySQL 8.0 clusters were deployed. In addition, several AWS ElastiCache Redis clusters. PlanA Earth sought ISO 27001 and SoC2 certification. We took over the monitoring of the assets and resources with Vanta.

Technologies used:
AWS, GitHub, Bitbucket. Redis, Terraform, Terragrunt, Ubuntu, Alpine, MySQL, PHP8, React

10/2020 - 09/2021
Senior AWS DevOps Engineer
Schüttflix GmbH (Architektur und Bauwesen, 50-250 Mitarbeiter)

Introduction of Infrastructure as Code and complete migration from on-premise to AWS. All systems are designed to scale. Porting and provisioning of all servers using Ansible. Network and data flow planning. Introduction of Continuous Integration with autoscaling groups, load balancers and blue-green deployments. Introduction of central log management. Creation of the backup, maintenance, monitoring and operations concept. Training the developers on AWS with over 20 hours of video material in English. Guidance of the other Site Reliability Engineers until handover to the Engineering Manager. Development of the rights and roles concept in AWS. Implementation of measures for the upcoming tech due diligence.

Technologies used:
AWS, Ansible, Gitlab, New Relic, Redis, Terraform, Terragrunt, Ubuntu, MySQL, PHP7

09/2020 - 09/2020
Senior AWS DevOps Engineer
SilverTours GmbH (Transport und Logistik, 50-250 Mitarbeiter)

Lead the project team for the implementation of the new transactional emails. Describe the responsive emails using MJML, translate with Phrase and test with Litmus. Creation of the CI/CD pipeline. BlueGreen deployment in AWS ECS. A lot of basic knowledge for working with e-mails had to be done here. We also evaluated a provider for sending a large number of booking emails per day.

Technologies used:
AWS, ECS, Litmus, MySQL, Phrase, PHP7

07/2020 - 07/2020
Senior AWS DevOps Engineer
Goldmedia Custom Research GmbH (Konsumgüter und Handel, < 10 Mitarbeiter)

Transfer of on-premise hardware from 1&1 IONOS to AWS with Ansible and Terraform. Introduction of CI/CD/CD pipelines for staging and production. Provisioning of servers with Ansible.

Technologies used:
AWS, Ansible, Apache, Docker + Docker Compose, Envoyer, GitHub, MySQL, PHP7

05/2020 - 06/2020
Senior AWS DevOps Engineer
SilverTours GmbH (Transport und Logistik, 50-250 Mitarbeiter)

Leading the project team to implement the company-wide testing strategy. Creation of Docker containers for local testing and in the Gitlab CI/CD pipeline. Upgrades of packages used, advising developers on migration of new testing environment. Refactoring of existing unit tests. Training the entire IT department on agile testing.
The project was halted due to the renewed outbreak of the Corona pandemic.

Technologies used:
AWS, Apache, Docker + Docker Compose, Gitlab, Nginx, MySQL, PHP7, PHPUnit

04/2019 - 05/2020
Senior AWS DevOps Engineer
SilverTours GmbH (Transport und Logistik, 50-250 Mitarbeiter)

Complete porting of the back office fullfilment system from onpremise to AWS with Terraform. Creation of the security and network concept. Porting of the 2TB MySQL. Porting of the NFS with  more than (2-digits) TB of data to AWS EFS. Porting and provisioning of all servers using Ansible. Introduction of Continuous Integration with Autoscaling groups, Load Balancer and BlueGreen Deployments. Introduction of centralized log management. Creation of the backup, maintenance, monitoring and operation concept. Training of developers on DevOps, AWS and Terraform.

Technologies used:
AWS, Apache, Gitlab, New Relic, Lambda, Memcache, Molecule, MySQL, PHP7, Perl, Python, Packer, ProxySQL, Redis, Symfony, Terraform, Ubuntu, Zend Framework

04/2019 - 12/2019
Senior AWS DevOps Engineer
Greator GmbH (Marketing, PR und Design, 50-250 Mitarbeiter)

Creation and implementation of the backup concept for the local NAS of the video editing department. Initial backup of 250TB using AWS Snowball to AWS S3 Glacier Deep Archive with subsequent incremental backup in Docker.
Assisted IT administration with heavy growth due to new employees. Troubleshooting local network, upgrading video editing machines and network to 10 GBit, assisting CTO with overall application process. Training staff on how to use AWS and Infrastructure as Code.

Technologies used:
AWS, Apache, Docker + Docker Compose, Gitlab, Nginx, MySQL, PHP7, PHPUnit

08/2017 - 03/2019
Senior AWS DevOps Engineer
Trustedshops GmbH (Internet und Informationstechnologie, 500-1000 Mitarbeiter)

Porting of Monoliths to AWS using Terraform, Packer, Ansible, Consul and Vault. Migration from Jenkins to CircleCI, migration from Gitlab to Github, migration of all databases to AWS, introduction of ProxySQL for load balancing, provisioning, rolling deployments and upgrades of all servers with Ansible. Introduction of standards in software development, introduction of modern development tools, conducting sessions and workshops on agile testing, clean code and dealing with technical debt, creating the company-wide testing strategy.

Technologies used:
AWS, Apache, CircleCI, Docker + Docker Compose, Github, Instana, Java, JBoss, Keycloak, Lambda, MariaDB, Memcache, Molecule, MySQL Percona Cluster, Nginx, PHP, Packer, ProxySQL, Redis, Symfony, Terraform, TypeScript, Ubuntu, Vagrant, Vault

03/2012 - 07/2017
Team Lead Backend Development
Chefkoch GmbH (Internet und Informationstechnologie, 50-250 Mitarbeiter)

Introduction of Scrum and Kanban for 6 teams, setup and management of 15 developers for agile working. Introduction of CI/CD pipelines and test automation. Migration from PHP 5.0 to PHP 7, conversion from Memcache to Redis, conversion from Latin1 to UTF-8 (codebase + database), introduction of Atlassian Jira, Confluence and Bamboo. Introduction of Continuous Integration, introduction of unit testing, conversion from monolith to microservice architecture. Responsible for 15 employees.

Technologies used:
Bamboo, CoreOS, Confluence, Debian, Docker + Docker Compose, Drupal, Elastic Search, Git, Jenkins, Jira, MariaDB, Memcache, PHP, PHP Unit, Packer, Redis, Selenium, Silex, Squid, Subversion, Symfony, Ubuntu, Vagrant, Zend Framework

03/2011 - 02/2012
Senior Developer
WER-KENNT-WEN.DE GMBH (Telekommunikation, 50-250 Mitarbeiter)

Supervised 10+ developers in scaling the systems for 9.3 million registered users, further development of features for users and employees, creation of an in-house advertising server for more than 5 billion ad impressions per month, creation of reports for the management, further development of the in-house PHP framework.

Technologies used:
Apache, CSS, C++, Debian, Javascript, Jenkins, Memcache, MySQL, PHP, Puppet, RabbitMQ, Squid, Zend Framework

03/2008 - 02/2011
Developer
WER-KENNT-WEN.DE (Telekommunikation, 50-250 Mitarbeiter)

At werkenntwen.de, we have developed one of the largest platforms in Germany. It was a social network with over 9.3 million registered users. At the same time, up to 250,000 people were on the platform, generating more than 5 billion page views a month.
Further development of features for the user, scaling setup and improvement of monitoring systems, introduction of Scrum and Kanban into software development.

Technologies used:
Apache, Debian, Javascript, Memcache, MySQL, PHP, RabbitMQ, Zend Framework

03/2004 - 02/2008
Developer
Michel Development & Consulting GmbH (Internet und Informationstechnologie, 10-50 Mitarbeiter)

Agency business for various clients in the B2B area, programming of a large web store in 15 languages and a portal for General Electric field staff. Creation of a workflow tool for the production of a print catalog in 10 languages.

Technologies used:
Apache, Debian, CSS, Gentoo, Javascript, MySQL, PHP, Subversion, Mantis

Reisebereitschaft

Weltweit verfügbar
Personal preferences
  • Project duration: At least 3 months or longer
  • Preferably remote, 4-5 days per week (32-40 hours).
  • For hybrid projects in the Cologne/Düsseldorf area, I would be willing to spend a maximum of 1 day per week (i.e. 8 days per month in total) on-site for any team or alignment meetings.
In case of exciting project offers with different conditions I would be willing to make exceptions if necessary.

Sonstige Angaben

For interesting/innovative project proposals from any of the following industries/sectors, there is a high probability of receiving a timely response from me:
  • Cloud & Edge Computing
  • Big Data & Augmented Analytics
  • Electromobility
  • Green Energy/Greentech
  • FinTech
  • Healthcare/Biotech
  • IoT
  • Video processing
On the other hand, you can save any inquiries from the following industries/sectors:
  • Fossil fuels/non-renewable energies
  • Armaments, weapons and war industries
  • Companies that act/operate unethically in terms of human rights, animal rights and/or environmental issues, such as (but not limited to)
    • Abercrombie & Fitch
    • Axel Springer SE incl. all subsidiaries and brands
    • Meta/Facebook
    • Monsanto
    • Nestle
    • Palantir
I am not, never have been and never will be interested in employee leasing or the "Swiss model". Please refrain from any inquiries in this direction or you will be blocked without comment.
Profilbild von Christian Kappen AWS | Cloud | DevOps | Infrastructure Architecture aus Wachtberg AWS | Cloud | DevOps | Infrastructure Architecture
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