About Patrick D'appollonio

Who am I?

My name is Patrick D’appollonio. I’m a Chilean that has been working for a handful of companies in North and South America as a Software Engineer. I’m currently working at Netlify as a Staff Software Engineer building the “Netlify for Netlify”: a pipeline to build, test, and deploy Netlify’s own internal services.

While you might be tempted to call me a DevOps engineer, I’ve worked mostly in backend applications that happen to be running as DevOps tooling, specifically empowering Kubernetes clusters and Continuous Integration and Delivery.

You can find me on Twitter as @marlex and on GitHub as patrickdappollonio. All my projects you might be interested in are listed in the projects page of this blog.

Biggest achievements

I led the migration of one of the biggest Canadian banks to the Cloud: As an expert in Cloud Native technologies, I helped a Canadian bank migrate their entire infrastructure from Pivotal Cloud Foundry to Google Cloud, achieving great results in terms of cost and performance. Here’s the press release article from Scotiabank & Google Cloud.
I co-owned an Audiotour & Audioguides company: I was the managing partner for Sonusland Inc. A Florida-registered company dedicated to the creation of audio tours and audioguides for museums and other cultural institutions. I was in charge of the technical aspects of the company, from the backend needed to run the company to the development of the mobile applications that powered them. I also led all technical efforts of the dba. ImPlaces LLC., an online-only audiotour companion app. Example video of the Control Panel my team and I developed and the mobile application consuming this content, as well as Media Coverage for both ImPlaces and Sonusland at eMerge Americas 2015.
I was part of the team leading the effort of infrastructure automation at DreamWorks: While working at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, we turned HPE’s OneView – a VM and bare-metal vending machine solution – into DreamWorks Cloud, a fully automated infrastructure solution that allowed DreamWorks to spin up and down VMs and bare-metal machines at will, and in a fully automated fashion. Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s & DreamWorks partnership in a video.
I was part of the team that built Ubisoft’s in-house Kubernetes offering: With hundreds of teams and hundreds of production and even more non-production Kubernetes Clusters, I led and was part of the team that made it possible to automate, at scale, the creation of Kubernetes clusters for Ubisoft’s internal teams. Through a partnership with Rancher Labs (now owned by SUSE), we made it possible to spin up production-grade clusters in our own datacenter as well as public clouds in just minutes. SuSE’s Coverage of the partnership is here.

Technologies & Languages

Among the programming languages and technology stacks I work with, you’ll find:

Go (Golang) programming, for backend services and tooling for DevEx.
VueJS for anything Frontend.
JAMStack, for building static sites and applications.

I’m well versed in the following technologies:

Kubernetes, from running applications in them to building tooling for them (operators, controllers, etc).
ArgoCD & FluxCD, for GitOps.
Jenkins X, Tekton, GitHub Actions, Woodpecker/Drone and other CI/CD tools.
Docker, from building images to running them in production.
Amazon Cloud Services (AWS) and Google Cloud.
OpenStack, for in-house private cloud solutions.
Linux, with several CLI applications developed for it.

Work Experience

Staff Engineer @ Netlify (May 2022 - Present)

Netlify Working in the “Netlify for Netlify” (ironic, huh?), a full pipeline of automation from code to deployment covering the entire company. If you’re a Netlify customer and your site “just works” it’s because of the pipelines the Netlify teams have in place to make it happen.

Working across multiple teams to coordinate the efforts in areas like:

Reducing time to market by cutting release time to minutes (from hours, days)
Allowing for extensive testing in disposable environments reducing bugs landing in production by over 75%
Reduce operational cost by efficiently scheduling workloads, pipelines and the likes in low-cost cloud provider offerings (such as AWS spot instances) to reduce Cloud fixed costs by 60%
Work with all Netlify departments and teams to provide governance and auditing capabilities to their release process, allowing for visibility through the entire process

Skills: Amazon Web Services (AWS) · Software Development · DevOps · Docker Products · Go (Programming Language) · Golang · Kubernetes · Linux.

Lead Consultant @ Sourced Group (July 2021 to May 2022)

Sourced Group Working with the banking and telecommunication industry to show them how to make Cloud at Scale™️. My current work involves leading multiple teams in our customer’s companies and help them drive Cloud adoption – from migrating workloads to Kubernetes to tailoring Cloud Offerings to their workloads.

In this role, I’ve also worked with stakeholders and product/project managers to take their requirements to production, looking to implement changes in a timely manner and making it work with a short time to market, iterating over MVPs to quickly gather feedback from end users and looping over multiple’s teams development cycles.

Among the cloud transformations worked with customers there are:

Migration of workloads to Kubernetes
Hardening and Security of Kubernetes workloads with solutions like ExternalSecrets
Service Meshes in a multi-cluster approach, multi-region and multi-AZ.
GitOps integration with ArgoCD
Platform Governance

I also worked closely with our partners from Google Cloud to ensure our customers follow closely the latest developments, as well as ensure we have a direct line of sight to all new innovation.

Skills: Artifactory · Software Development · Jenkins · DevOps · Docker Products · Go (Programming Language) · Golang · Kubernetes · Linux.

Senior Technical Lead @ Ubisoft (January 2019 to July 2021)

Ubisoft Working at Ubisoft to provide production teams with the tools and computing power needed to perform their jobs. Integrating the service offering of Rancher into the Ubisoft Cloud ecosystem as well as providing teams the option to build Kubernetes clusters easily and in-house, rather than in 3rd party clouds.

My role as a Product Specialist and Technical Lead is to take production teams, analyze and understand their requirements, and provide solutions tailored to the Kubernetes offering my team provides, while at the same time empowering them to achieve their goals faster, providing technical guidance, recommendations, analysis and more.

Skills: Artifactory · Software Development · Jenkins · DevOps · Docker Products · Vue.js · Rancher · OpenStack · Go (Programming Language) · Golang · Kubernetes

Senior Platform Engineer, Team Lead @ DreamWorks Animations (October 2017 to January 2019)

DreamWorks Platform Engineer for the Platform Services Operation team, in charge of the project of DreamWorks Cloud. An all in one solution for creatives within DreamWorks which provides with tooling easy to use to create fully configured VMs and Bare Metal machines.

Developed the web interface using VueJS as a Single-page application, which allowed artists at DreamWorks to provision their own machines in a jargon that’s understandable for people that don’t know technicalities about VM or Bare Metal provisioning.
Development of a Terraform provider so power users can retain a powerful option to perform automation, while still allow newcomers to virtual machines and configuration management to use the UI
Help define the architecture of the entire application, among the usage of Terraform, Ruby for Backend, Go for Backend, Foreman for VM provisioning, OneView for Bare Metal provisioning, Sidekiq for task queues, and everything in a Kubernetes-based environment.

Alongside DreamWorks Cloud, I provided assistance to the Platform Engineering team which maintains a Kubernetes cluster which is used by artists and IT engineers alike to provision inner applications and tooling, while maintaining a simple-to-use convention-over-configuration CI / CD pipeline built in house.

Skills: Software Development · DevOps · Docker Products · HPE OneView · Vue.js · Go (Programming Language) · Golang · Terraform · Kubernetes · Linux.

Datacenter Care Infrastructure Automation Engineer @ Hewlett Packard Enterprise (November 2016 to October 2017)

Hewlett-Packard Enterprise Engineer in charge of working with HPE customers to bring them into the realm of services of HPE, providing them with server solutions, software and training. The entire process was based on collocation for a few days with the customer to understand their needs followed by an ongoing process of providing feedback and best practices.

Additionally, besides selling HPE offerings, other third party solutions were bundled in this, like Apache Mesos / Mesosphere; Terraform for Infrastructure as Code; Git and CI / CD, including GitOps; Configuration management with Chef, Puppet or Ansible; as well as suggestions and industry best practices.

Skills: Software Development · DevOps · Docker Products · Vue.js · Go (Programming Language) · Golang

Go Backend Developer @ K-Force, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (May 2016 to November 2016)

K-Force Go lead backend developer for the API and CLI of an undisclosed VM vending software by HPE, superceded by SimpliVity and HPE OneView. Among the duties here were:

Build the CLI application from scratch from an original proof of concept
Continue development of the Backend API built in Go, which connects to multiple HPE third party tools to gather data, analyze results and queue VM vending
Collaborate with the UI team to offer the interconnectivity between the backend and the frontend

Skills: Software Development · DevOps · Docker Products · Go (Programming Language) · Golang

Managing Partner, Engineering @ Sonusland Inc, dba The Osome Factory (December 2013 to March 2016)

Sonusland Managing Partner for Engineering at Sonusland Incorporated, where I served both as an Engineering Lead for our teams as well as a developer. The lead service, ImPlaces www.implaces.com is the Platform-as-a-Service that handles the publish and usage of mobile audiotours. The backend is written in NodeJS using Express, MongoDB with Mongoose and EJS. It performs audio processing such as short previews, normalization and ID3 edition by piping information to soxi, a swiss tool for simple MP3 processing.

During my time here I developed both the Android and iOS apps using Xamarin Forms —each customer has its own mobile app—, with several per-platform modifications such as Drawer menus and Media Playing. There’s also an API written in Go that handles sending the proper information to all devices, RSS management, on-the-fly content preview generation and there’s also a Push Notification Service for both iOS and Android using Go’s Uniqush service.

I also developed several services and platforms for third-party companies using the d/b/a called “The Osome Factory” (typo intended). The most recognized up-to-date is the Mercury Americas Pricing App, a mobile app to generate quotes for a freight forwarding company written in C# / Xamarin Forms. The web panel handles pricing management and allows the creation of user accounts with roles, where an admin can see the prices from their app without additional overcharges while normal users can see their corresponding prices with Mercury fees’ included. The app is currently in use in more than 17 offices across the globe that manages services from Mercury Americas, under the group GSSA Global Force.

Skills: Business Development · Entrepreneurship · Software Development · DevOps · Go (Programming Language) · Golang · MongoDB · Node.js · JavaScript · Linux