Cory Wright - Resume

Experienced systems engineer and software developer with a passion for automation.

Professional Experience

Responsible for automation and configuration management of customer facing production infrastructure
Designed and deployed OpenStack Swift cluster with Keystone, Ceilometer, and Gnocchi

Systems Engineer for the Cloud Block Storage product
Responsible for all production software deployments, with zero downtime due to deployments
Designed and implemented a highly organized system for configuration management using SaltStack
Automated massively complex deployment process down to roughly 90 seconds from over 30 minutes
Implemented automatic nic-bonding configuration during server initializations
Migrated production systems from system Debian packages to Python virtualenvs with no downtime
Designed and built an automated build system for cross platform packages of internal software

Developer on the Slicehost and Rackspace Cloud Servers teams
Performed initial design and implementation work on abstraction layer to allow use of multiple hypervisor backends
Worked extensively on an internal image (vm) delivery and caching service
Conducted interviews during team build-up phase
Spoke at first OpenStack conference on image delivery and caching. Worked on initial designs of the Glance image service
Added support for OpenVSwitch and OpenFlow to OpenStack Nova
Implemented configurable boot parameters to OpenStack Nova XenServer instances

Software developer and systems administrator at four person startup
Built RSS/Atom feed aggregation system in Ruby on Rails (similar project to FeedBurner)
Built a mobile photo sharing site called Natuba using Django, PostgreSQL, and Xapian
Wrote a system to parse incoming mail messages to extract images, text, and tags, as well as handle bounces and alerts
Integrated Natuba with Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr using APIs
Wrote a Python based deployment system to integrate with our infrastructure and automatically handle JavaScript minification and CSS compression
Used a combination of Varnish and Panther CDN to provide fast access to Natuba images
Used agile methodologies and practiced test-driven development

Managed and built-out Rackspace's globally distributed DNS infrastructure
Infrastructure consisted of 20 authoritative DNS servers and 40 caching DNS servers, all running Debian Linux
Used Anycast DNS techniques to announce IP addresses from multiple geographical points around the Internet. BGP and OSPF were used to ensure fault-tolerance and redundancy
Responsible for 5 millisecond DNS response times resulting in #1 ranking on Netcraft's "Hosting Provider Network Performance" 4-5 times while in the position
Managed DNS for 400k domains, 8 millions records (including YouTube.com, at the time)
Wrote a web app for internal users to directly query all authoritative and caching servers to see the status of individual DNS records on a server-by-server basis. This was used by the Rackspace support teams to troubleshoot DNS issues
Engineered migration from legacy BIND to djbdns on production authoritative DNS systems
Wrote software to deploy changes to all DNS servers
In addition to my DNS responsibilities I also assisted a special projects team (Blackbox), primarily managing a Ruby on Rails infrastructure
- Managed 10 Linux servers running Rails applications using Mongrel
- Installed and managed the continuous integration server for all Ruby projects

Worked as a software developer and systems administrator on the CORE team. CORE is Rackspace's proprietary software system for managing customer accounts, servers, datacenters, network information, DNS, product configuration, and nearly all aspects of the Rackspace business
Responsible for the Rackspace bandwidth metering and billing infrastructure. At the time bandwidth overage billing was the company's second largest source of revenue
Standardized the bandwidth monitoring and reporting codebase from 4 anomalous systems and packaged it into RPMs to simplify upgrades and deployments
Refactored and maintained a system used to inject routes directly into Cisco routers and switches. This "route injector" automatically configured new static routes as IP addresses were assigned to servers in the CORE system
Co-responsible for administering the CORE infrastructure including 80+ Linux servers, mostly running Red Hat Linux
Managed the company's source code controls systems. Initially with BitKeeper, but later migrated to Subversion
Co-responsible for managing all production deployments. Helped standardized this procedure, and set up a staging system identical to production
Documented internal processes only known by few senior team members, and administered a document management system for this purpose
Introduced to and practiced XP development methodologies

Built a PHP/MySQL/Zope/Apache based documentation system for various military applications

Migrated Linux Journal web infrastructure from unstable environment to modern Ubuntu based systems
The system is PHP based, running Drupal and MySQL on Ubuntu with RAID10

Built an internal application used by the company at their bi-annual sales events using Linux, Python, and MySQL. The system was responsible for tracking rebates on $40-50 million in sales per event.
Wrote an application to bridge data from an IBM AS/400 mainframe system to modern Linux based servers

Advised and assisted companies with designing and implementing scalable mail infrastructures. This included SMTP servers (Postfix and qmail), POP3/IMAP servers, and various anti-spam techniques
Wrote a custom anti-spam solution for mail offering by NameShare Registrar

Bachelor of Arts, History, Hampden-Sydney College, May 2001
Intensive Mandarin courses, Chinese Culture University (Taipei, Taiwan), September 2011 - March 2012

Invited to and attended the first "Startup School" by YCombinator, Harvard, October 2005.
Attended Defcon computer security conference in Las Vegas, 2005-2013, 2017
Attended and presented at BarCamp Houston, August 2007
Invited to and attended ORD Camp, Chicago, 2009, 2010
Attended Pycon 2010
Presented at first OpenStack summit, 7/2010, on image delivery and caching
Attended OpenStack Design Summits in 7/2010, 11/2010, 4/2011, 4/2013, 11/2013, 11/2015, 4/2016
Attended SaltConf in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017
Attended Cassandra Summit in 2016
Attended OSCON in 2017

References available upon request.