Pieter Avonts

DevOps Architect

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Summary

I have 10+ years of experience with Linux systems, always with a focus on automation, Infrastructure as Code and DevOps. As a DevOps Architect, I bring lots of hands-on experience and creativity in making different tools and people work together and get to that optimal environment and workflow. Elevating both results and experience to the next level.

Experience

NTT Belgium

01/2022 - Present

NTT Belgium is the belgian subsidiary of NTT Ltd, a Global Technology and Business Solutions Provider.

Technical & Architecture Consultant

As a consultant at NTT, I was able to evolve my skills as an architect and step outside of my technical comfort zone. Use my knowledge and expertise to help clients progress on the path of DevOps, automation and Cloud Native Computing.

  • Enabled both stream-aligned and platform teams, helping the teams to overcome obstacles and provide advise and knowledge to accelerate the value delivery.
  • Provided guidance on patterns and best practices in working with Infrastructure as Code, migration to the cloud and the journey to Cloud Native Computing.
  • Collaborate internally to grow DevOps culture and practices.

Western Digital

10/2017 - 12/2021

Western Digital Corporation is an American computer hard disk drive manufacturer and data storage company.

DevOps Lead

Within Western Digital I got the opportunity to build out an environment on a global scale based on the best practices of Infrastructure as Code and DevSecOps. Using my expertise to streamline workflows, be a mentor and onboard whole teams into DevSecOps.

  • Proposal, implementation and guidance on DevSecOps architecture, open standard, framework, policies and best practices.
  • Lead contributor to the end-to-end automation of infrastructure and application management, presenting excellent Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and GitOps implementations with Ansible and other modern technologies like Kubernetes Operators for a large number of CI/CD and Agile services in both standalone or (globally spread) high available topologies.
  • Design and implementation of an environment to consolidate automation efforts in a large and diverse global company, providing a standard and promoting collaboration, enabling engineers with different levels of proficiency to work and grow technically.
  • Assisted in the career development of others, actively mentoring individuals and teams on advanced technical issues and throughout the execution of their individual objectives.
  • Collaborate and assist with engineering teams in optimising workflows, increasing their productivity and effectiveness by onboarding them into IaC, automation and DevOps.
  • Assisted in building out team. Help in hiring, mentoring new team members and providing an environment that enables easy onboarding of new members and scaling up the team.
  • Design and creation of opensource mixed architecture Kubernetes clusters for an internal on-premise CaaS (Containers as a Service) environment. Providing cloud computing on a global scale without leaving company infrastructure.
  • Coding custom tools and plugins to extend functionality of existing frameworks and connecting different frameworks together.
  • Keep DevOps tools, services and processes aligned with the latest evolutions in the industry.

Ypto (former Syntigo)

07/2010 - 10/2017

Ypto is a wholly owned subsidiary of Belgian Railways and provides information technology services exclusively to its parent company.

Operations Engineer

Within Ypto, I set my first steps in both IT and automation. I played a leading role in transforming a manually managed environment consisting of physical servers running middleware and multiple J2EE applications into an automated virtual environment.

  • Installation, configuration and administration of WebSphere environments running 90+ J2EE applications.
  • Assisting developers in debugging of Java applications.
  • Development of a custom Python framework for deploying and configuring WebSphere environments.
  • Build and deployment of WebSphere Thin Client and Python wrapper.
  • Creation of multiple true Python scripts for configuration and administration of WebSphere environments using the API (WSAdmin).
  • Writing Ansible playbooks and roles for deploying WebSphere environments.
  • Refactoring of PHP frontend and creation of a Python backend for deploying Java applications in WebSphere.
  • Development of automation for a wide variety of Linux system administration tasks.
  • Monitoring hosts and services using Nagios/Icinga.
  • General Linux system administration and troubleshooting.

Education

Intec

03/2010 - 06/2010

Information Technology

  • Linux System Engineer

Hogeschool PXL (former Provinciale Hogeschool Limburg)

09/2003 - 08/2009

Master (Academic Bachelor in 2007) Arts

  • Graphic Design

Hogeschool PXL (former Provinciale Hogeschool Limburg)

09/2000 - 08/2002

Master Architecture

  • Architecture