Dana M. Diederich

Objective

I am seeking a hands-on, team-oriented role at a stable, technologically progressive company where we will be able to facilitate evolutionary and revolutionary adoption of leading edge technologies, intended to produce consistently growing operational return on investment.

• I am passionate about improving operational processes and flows via the collaborative approach of design and architecture. Fundamentally, I am a programmer with decades of hands-on operational experience, ranging from all kinds of Linux system administration to databases to strong networking skills.
• Collaboratively designing and shipping high availability is my forte. Through many and diverse focus areas, LiveOps achieved 99.99% availability in Q4 2011. The VP of Operations at the time, Gary Slater, stated that my work was the single largest factor behind that achievement.
• Above all, I seek to understand, assimilate and process all of the issues, big and small, that stand in the way of efficient and smooth operations, using that analysis to design elegant integration solutions. Shipping that automation so my co-workers can get their work done is job one.

Achievements

• 99.99% availability Q4 2011:  There were many facets to this achievement
  
  
  • Exceptional monitoring coverage of the entire production platform.
  • Innovative release management and automation.
  • Structural reduction of single points of failures in various critical paths.
  • Long-term and deep architectural work with various Engineering areas.
  • Day to day focus on nearly every operational facet of the platform.
• World-class Monitoring:  John Chambers, CEO of Cisco Systems, was so impressed with what our team created that he sent a team of senior engineers, under NDA, to examine the monitoring system we built at Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., to consider licensing it.
• The 'Go To' person for real-time incident management:  If something is on fire, I am frequently the person who is asked to manage the incident.
• Regulatory/PCI/SOX lead:  As regulatory lead at multiple companies, I've learned how to balance the competing needs of making an organization secure, meeting regulatory requirements and keeping operations and development agile and efficient.
• Team Building:  Making sure the people I work with have what they need is critical. This important work isn't done as their manager, but as their co-worker, confidant and friend.
• Efficiency Always:  I have a hard rule: servers need to spend resources on the application, not operational tools and agents. The solutions I design and the software I am responsible for almost never show up in 'top' on production servers. Over four years, while the platform volume went up three-fold, resources used by my automation has stayed flat.

Character

• Innovative:  At LiveOps, the existing graphing infrastructure was old and fallen into out of date, making it very difficult to add any new metrics. Over a week, I found, analyzed, piloted, tested and started graphing a dozen highly useful operational metrics using Graphite. A few months later, efficiently using existing hardware resources, we were minutely graphing tens of thousands of metrics.
• Driven:  I will work through any obstacles or challenges that arise during the pursuit of a strategic or tactical objective. At Wal-Mart, we needed to deploy our management systems into all of the remote sites. Due to some arcane and undocumented systems restrictions, the first two rollout attempts were not successful. We tried another method to write the software and it rolled out completely and without incident. It has served monitoring and management needs flawlessly ever since.
• Customer Focused:  One of the key benefits I bring to any organization is customer focus. I consider any person or organization I come in contact and can assist a potential customer. At LiveOps, our senior release engineer was becoming overwhelmed with many different kinds of weekly software releases, so I permanently took over a portion of them, using that hands-on experience to architect and design a cutting edge release system. I also served as backup for the primary Linux sysadmins, DBAs and Network Engineers when people were either busy or out of the office.
• Humility:  All too often, senior operations people don't feel it necessary to sit down and work with many people in their area and company, including the fresh college hires. One of my core beliefs is that automation is best designed after spending time working with the stake-holders. Whatever tools ego builds will not be long useful or long lasting.

Skill Areas

Work History

Oracle	Principal Applications Engineer	2021-present	Helped migrate away from legacy F5 load balancers to Oracle Cloud (OCI) native. Worked to maintain and improve the internal Host Management System, which is used by a wide variety of customer facing products for deployment, failover, DR and general management.
Lumos Labs	Devops Engineer	2020-2021	Generally supported the AWS based cloud infrastrucutre, and greatly improved developer productivity by creating Environment Manager, a system that allows various products and platforms to be created, suspended, restarted, snapshotted and restored on demand. This also represents great AWS cost savings potential.
Facebook	Systems Engineer	2018-2020	Working on the Enterprise Engineering traffic team, I created multiple mission critical services, including a system that replicated internal global load balancing to external global load balancing in real time. I also created a powerful automated troubleshooting tool system, allowing anybody in the company to investigate all kinds of potential problems with their load balanced services.
Orbital Insight	Devops Engineer	2017-2018	Orbital is a startup, so I was involved in a wide variety of typical operational topics. I headed up multiple Kubernetes proofs of concept, and helped start a company-wide migration to k8s. I also revamped the monitoring infrastructure, moving from static to dynamic configurations.
Twitch Interactive, an Amazon company	Video Devops Engineer	2016-2017	Tools developer for the Video team, I helped design and derive next generation operational architecture, along with the delivery of a service that protects resources from impacting changes.
Flux Factory	Software Engineer	2015-2016	Primarily automation and tooling, but also did system and security administration.
Ariba, an SAP company	Principal Software Engineer (Cloud)	2013-2015	Served as the technical leader of the Tools team as we navigated balancing support for ancient, legacy systems and migration to newer, more mainstream technologies.
LiveOps Inc	Senior Operations Tools Developer	2009-2013	Primary tools/devops developer, also served as Linux system administrator, Database Administrator. Major focus was on monitoring and release management.
Wal-Mart Stores, Inc	Advanced Network Engineer	1997-2009	Co-founded the Network Management team, our work included UNIX system administration, Database administration, regulatory compliance, security, and much more.
NorthWest Arkansas Community College	Instructor, Linux System Administration	2003	We covered everything from installation to configuration to management/maintenance to security.
NorthWest Arkansas Community College	Instructor, Perl Programming	2002	Taught from the Llama Book.
US Air Force	Senior Airman, Computer Programmer	1993-1997	Did work in a wide variety of roles, including system administration, network security, operations, and more.

Formal Education, newest to oldest

• OCI Architect Associate (2024)
• Neo4J training
• Puppet training
• System Management Arts In Charge (SMARTS)
• Java training
• HP OpenView training, multiple sections
• Advanced Cisco Configuration
• HP IT Operations, multiple sections
• JavaScript training
• Franklin Covey, multiple sections
• Military technical training, computer programming, at Keesler Air Force Base, Biloxi, Mississippi
• Military basic training at Lackland Air Force Base, San Antonio, Texas
• Minor in music composition and conducting from the same
• Most of a Computer Science BS from The California State Polytechnic University in Pomona California
• Completed secondary education at Leffingwell High School, Norwalk, California

References Available Upon Request