Larry Ludlow

Lead the IT team in optimizing technology operations, including infrastructure management, network security, and database administration.

Develop and implement IT policies and systems aligned with organizational strategies to enhance operational efficiency.

Manage annual budget planning and resource allocation, ensuring cost-effective utilization of IT resources.

Build and nurture vendor relationships to secure reliable IT services and solutions.

Mentor and develop a high-performing IT team, fostering a culture of continuous learning and collaboration.

Automate all the things to minimize human error.

Built an ansible framework to manage cumulus network devices across multiple data centers.

Created a highly available, distributed S3 offering to provide tier 3 storage to our customers.

Provide Tier 3 support for customers and channel partners.

MOP/SOP for front-line support and deployment teams so they can utilize ansible to reduce time to delivery/recovery

Wrote training materials and held classes on ansible, gitlab, docker, and CI/CD practices.

Developed ansible good practices to streamline new projects.

Actively work with the product team to develop new offerings and improve existing.

Built a lab to support the proliferation of automation within the organization.

POC for vCloud director to better support multi-tenancy in our vmware environment.

Integrated 3 client portals using a microservices backend architecture, substantially enhancing customer experience, and reducing billing man-hours by an estimated 95%.

Headed a comprehensive infrastructure and process modernization initiative that established a new support desk and a fully integrated configuration management database (CMDB).

Maintain CI/CD for all facets of online and mobile ordering.

Develop ansible and terraform modules for maintenance and growth of our multi-cloud environment (MS Azure and Google cloud).

Built a modular monitoring and metrics stack utilizing prometheus, influxdb, grafana, alertmanager in a container environment to scale as needed.

Configured federation between monitoring systems in each virtual environment (VPC).

Created predictive algorithms to alert on potential problems before they happen.

Built a container environment to host .netCore applications with auto-scaling to provide cost savings over a standard machine deployment.

Built several proof of concepts to manage remote store systems (15,000+). Most of these utilized ansible to perform the configuration with a higher level orchestration (salt, puppet, foreman)

Wrote an ESB consumer and dispatcher in Python to replace windows based services.

Committed upstream fixes to several open source products we utilize.

Developed a python based service to scrape metrics from our cloud providers and expose them to a metrics endpoint for prometheus consumption.

Responsible for all Linux servers in a multi-company environment. Systems include Ubuntu, CEntOS, and Redhat Enterprise Linux.

Managed automated builds and deployments using Stash and Bamboo.

Automated deployments to AWS using bamboo and docker.

Built a configuration management system using Ansible to deploy, configure, and ensure against configuration drift. I have also developed many other ansible plays for inventory collection, patching, and PCI remediation. Additionally, I wrote plugins to send status of each of these to our central logging system.

Developed a centralized log management system using Logstash, Elasticsearch, Kabana, and HAProxy to provide a highly available and scalable method of collecting logs from our servers, infrastructure, and applications.

Implemented a server monitoring system and integrated it with our alerting system and slack.

Built a server and application metrics dashboard using Graphite, Grafana, and collectd. This has enabled dev, ops, and support people to see historic system metrics and better troubleshoot servers and applications.

Managed a $13MM budget across staffing, licensing, projects, and resources.

Directed a $3MM data center migration following a company acquisition.

Cut costs by negotiating better licensing agreements with vendors.

Reduced server deployment time from a matter of weeks to days.

Deployed SCCM to facilitate deployment review and approval processes.

Promoted from team leader to manager.

Provide support for large multi-location enterprise Linux deployment consisting of 200+ Suse Linux Enterprise Servers, 30+ RedHat Servers, 20 Open Enterprise Servers, and a small mix of Netware and Solaris servers.

Create and maintain server provisioning, build process, and version control for all Linux distributions that we support.

Provide strategic planning and Project management for the Linux team.

Implemented Enterprise NTP time services.

Implemented Veritas Clustering and Storage foundation in order to reduce the number of storage management tools and improve overall performance and availability.

Tested and reviewed products to provide enterprise log aggregation and search functions.

Provided direction and a single point of contact for a large data center migration/consolidation project that involved physically moving 150+ servers from an older, outdated data center to our newly built state-of-the-art data center.

In charge of vendor relationships, product renewals, and purchases for the Linux team.

Upgraded 90+ Solaris servers in multiple locations worldwide to version 10 for Nissan USA.

Installed and upgraded websphere application servers, WebSphere MQ servers, and WebSphere Portal servers to the latest version on 30 Solaris servers for Nissan USA.

Built a Redhat server infrastructure to support FEA analysis portals for GE Aerospace/MSC Software.

Deployed and configured clustering for JBoss application servers at GE Aerospace/MSC Software.

Provided development support for engineering staff at GE Aerospace while developing a FEA portal while at MSC Software.

Lead engineer for the development and integration project of the MSC software suite while at MSC software / GE Aerospace.

Lead Engineer on a 'Fork Lift' Infrastructure upgrade (Solaris to Linux).

Implemented an internal update server (yum) and custom compile rpm's from source to meet our specific needs.

Compile RedHat Cluster Suite and GFS kernels from source to provide us with a cost-effective method of OS-level clustering and shared filesystems.

Assist with the installation and configuration of Oracle 10g RAC clusters.

Implemented a clustered JBoss AS environment (F5 Load balancers in front of an Apache web farm using mod_jk).

Migrated all local users and service accounts to a Highly Available LDAP directory server that synchronizes users' passwords with Active Directory.

Provide Linux training to DB and Systems administration teams.

Designed an Open source monitoring system that complements our existing Compuware Monitoring Suite and displays server health on a graphical representation of our network.