Mike Nichols

Extensive management experience with BSD/UNIX and GNU/Linux operating systems, containerization (including Kubernetes, Docker, and Jails), DevOps automation, and Continuous Integration.

Created dev and test environments off different applications by provisioning k8s clusters on AWS using Jenkins, Terraform, Ansible, and Docker.

One of my passions is metrics, monitoring, and security: I extensively use Prometheus, Elasticsearch, Grafana, and other tracing tools for custom platform autoscaling, troubleshooting, service level objectives, and auditing.

I have in depth knowledge of AWS cloud infrastructure, including EKS, and some exposure to Google Cloud.

Implemented Jenkins CI/CD concepts, jobs, builds, pipelines, triggering, testing, distributed, builds, artifacts, and PaaS model for engineering teams using Terraform with Infrastructure-as-code.

Experienced with Amazon AWS cloud administration services like: EC2, S3 EBS, VPC, ALB, AMI, SNS, RDS, IAM, Route53, Cloudfront, Cloudwatch, Cloudtrail, Cloudformation (inc. eksctl), Elasticache.

I prefer internally managed services (eg. Gitlab) over cloud-provided for security, privacy, and customization/control.

CD best practices like distributed builds, containerization, traceability, high availability, and auto repository builds.

Knows: Terraform, Helm, Ansible, Python, Bash, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, YAML.

Prefers: VIM with spaces (not tabs) and Zsh.

Capable: Golang, PHP, JAVA, Jenkins, VPN networking, Routing and Switching, and VPN administration.

Outside work I like to spend my time building Keyboards, Quadcopters, IoT hardware or sensors, Wireless (mesh networking), and most things involving ARM processors.

More passions: nuclear power, net neutrality / free speech, and Home Automation.