BEN WILLIAMS

5807 Kipling Court, Baltimore, MD 21212

732.241.2471

benwilliamsblack@gmail.com

Clearance : TS/SCI – Active

SENIOR CLOUD INFRASTRUCTURE ARCHITECT

Senior Cloud Infrastructure Architect seeking a challenging and dynamic leadership position with an advanced

technology firm to modernize computing infrastructures in both private data -centers and public cloud environments. It is

my intent to leverage my existing at-the-keyboard technical skills, architectural perspective, and customer focus to

bring innovative solutions to critical mission needs.

KEY SKILLS

  · Cloud Infrastructure

  · Virtualization Design

  ·

TECHNOLOGIES

  · Automation, Management, Monitoring

Puppet, Cobbler, Kickstart

AIDE, Ganglia, Nagios, Splunk

OpenLDAP, MySQL

  · Distributed Processing

Cloudera, Hadoop, MapReduce, Accumulo, Zookeeper

  · Microsoft Services

Active Directory, Exchange, SharePoint

Group Policy, IIS, DFS, Network Policy Server

  · Network and Storage

Cisco Catalyst, Nexus, ASA

NetAPP OnTAP

  · Operating Systems

RHEL/CentOS (5,6,7)

Windows Server (2003,2008,2012)

Windows (XP,Vista,7,8)

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

Associate Director – Systems Integration

Vistronix | Aberdeen Proving Ground, MD | Alexandria, VA

  · Oversee all activities for the System Integration division to include technical leadership, strategic planning, customer

relations, identifying new opportunities, and prototyping new technologies along with team building , career

development, staff retention, and conflict resolution.

  · Senior Cloud Infrastructure Architect for large scale Army advanced analytic processing s ystem. Provide direct

technical input, analysis, and recommendations to Chief Architect and Chief Technology Officer.

o Develop and verify automated deployment mechanisms for all system components using Puppet and

Cobbler. Write new puppet modules and bundle them into Cobbler profiles for deployments. Generate

and update Cobbler snippets to account for hardware or system specific deployment variables. Verify

successful installation on bare-metal systems and VMs with KVM and Cobbler KOAN.

o Designed, implemented, and validated a system wide integrity monitoring system leveraging AIDE,

Puppet, Cobbler, Splunk, and Nagios. System identifies any changes (permissions, ownership, content,

etc.) to security relevant files and provides a visual or email alert to system administrators via a

custom Nagios health check or Splunk email trigger. Automated deployment of system using Puppet

and Cobbler. System accepted by CCB and incorporated into baseline.

  · Amazon Web Services

EC2, EBS, S3, VPC, Elastic Load Balancing, Auto Scaling,

Security Groups, Route 53

  · Virtualization

VMWare ESXi, vSphere, vCenter, Workstation

Linux KVM

  · Microsoft Applications

Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint

Project, Visio

  · Web Services

HTTPD, Tomcat, JBoss

Ozone Widget Framework

  · Languages and Protocols

BASH, Perl, HTML, JavaScript, XML

SSH, VNC, RDP, DHCP, DNS, NTP, VLAN, QoS, XMPP,

ICMP, Syslog, SNMP

Infrastructure Automation

  · System Administration and Diagnostics

  · Team Leadership

  · Customer Interactions

  ·

  · Strategic Planning

Identifying Opportunities

Nov. 2009 to Present

BEN WILLIAMS

5807 Kipling Court, Baltimore, MD 21212

732.241.2471

benwilliamsblack@gmail.com

o Designed, implemented, and validated a secure remote management system leveraging SSHD,

OpenLDAP, Puppet, Cobbler, VNC-Server, and KDE. System provides an open-source virtual desktop

experience to allow remote administrators to interact with the system as though they were on-site.

System passes all traffic through an encrypted SSH tunnel using two-factor authentication and role

based access control. Researched and reworked the default VNC-Server session configurations to allow

multiple on-demand sessions vs. pre-defined persistent sessions. This enhancement resulted in an

overall reduction in resource requirements and an increase to session capacity. Automated deployment

of system using Puppet and Cobbler. System accepted by CCB and incorporated into baseli ne.

o Design resource optimized deployments for various hardware environments. Modify low level network

architecture including firewalls, routers, and switches. Modify host allocations between bare-metal and

virtual systems according to available resources, mission needs, and empirical performance data.

Implement changes on all firewalls, switches, routers, storage devices, physical and virtual hosts.

o Support Information Assurance Manager to identify security vulnerabilities. Support vulnerability

assessment and mitigation teams to correct weaknesses in systems according to appropriate STIGs

and ICD-503 guidance.

  · Develop new public and private cloud architecture proposals to support business needs both in -house and for our

customers. Perform technical and functional requirements analysis to prepare custom recommendations.

o Identified a potential $100,000 equipment cost savings by improving existing VM and hypervisor

management vs. purchasing additional server stacks for in-house lab environment.

o Developed custom micro-cloud proposal for an advanced airborne analytics platform to provide near

real-time analysis by processing sensor data aloft vs. post-flight.

o Served as Lead Technical Advisor to a remote management and monitoring application development

team. Developed working prototype to aggregate health status and monitoring metrics from disparate

devices and applications into a single simple web dashboard.

o Supported re-design of micro-cloud environment for iSCSI mounted SSD clusters vs. NFS mounted

spinning discs following favorable SSD performance demonstration.

  · Served as lead researcher for Army IA Working Group developing standards for Army ground vehicles.

o Researched various IA related technologies and made standardization proposals to working group.

o Supported development of technical implementation standards for authentication and authorization

using SAML assertions and XACML policies to describe a flexible A&A architecture for role and

attribute based access control deployments.

o Supported development of cross-vendor SOAP/WSDL interface for managing Type II Hypervisors and

Access Control Cross Domain Solutions

o Supported development of cross-vendor SOAP/WSDL interface for managing firewalls and IDSs

  · Design, implement, and manage all aspects of Corporate IT infrastructure.

o Managed migration from Windows SBS 2003 to 2008 R2 including Active Di rectory, Exchange,

SharePoint, file servers, backup and recovery systems, anti-virus applications, network security

enhancements, and network performance upgrades.

o Deployed corporate-wide open source XMPP based chat and desktop sharing application following

successful prototype and trial deployment.

o Established AD, Exchange, and SharePoint configurations to meet changing business needs.

o Deployed an interoffice DFS-R replication system to provide disaster recovery capability .

o Generated an in-house knowledge repository and trouble ticketing system based on open source

Redmine software. System is now used extensively by both development and administrative staff.

BEN WILLIAMS

5807 Kipling Court, Baltimore, MD 21212

732.241.2471

benwilliamsblack@gmail.com

IT Director / Regional Manager

Customized Distribution Services | Los Angeles, CA | San Diego, CA

  · Program Lead for an IR&D initiative to develop an enterprise logistics management system for the regional courier

industry. The system integrated GPS-enabled handhelds running a Java application with custom web-based fleet

management software, web-based order entry, and back-end accounting system interfaces to provide an end-to-end

enterprise management system. Application was deployed to the entire fleet after successful local and regional tests.

o Provided requirements, architecture, and design input to development teams. Supported integration,

test, and validation activities to ensure alignment with business application objectives.

o Directed phased deployment of application to the enterprise. Developed training plans for all driver,

dispatch, accounts receivable, and customer personnel.

  · Oversaw implementation and maintenance of Windows Server 2003 environment throughout the enterprise.

o Established and maintained Active Directory accounts, enterprise email, file sharing, print services,

WAN/VPN connectivity, and boundary protections for all regional offices.

  · Managed all daily operations for the Southern California Region including Los Angeles and San Diego.

o Established policies and procedures for staffing, inventory, customer service, and vendor issues that

dramatically improved profitability.

o Actively engaged with current and potential customers to maintain or establish positive relationships

and cultivate new market opportunities

INDEPENDENT RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT

  · Developed a working prototype small-business software suite from integrated open-source applications.

  ·

Jan. 2002 to Nov. 2009

Integrated open-source email, calendar, backup, file sharing, chat, teleconference, document management, and

knowledge repository applications with a central directory service and basic web portal.

  · Designed an automated deployment mechanism to provide push button simplicity for small-businesses using puppet,

bash, and perl scripts.

  · Performed load testing with Apache jMeter to establish local and/or virtual deployment resource requirements.

  · Deployed and validated prototype to Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud. Suite leverages EBS backed EC2 instances

using custom AMI’s in a VPC to provide end-users with a dedicated hosted small-business package.

EDUCATION

JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY – WHITING SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING, Baltimore, MD

Master of Science : Technical Management

GPA : 4.00 | Honors Graduate

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA – LOS ANGELES, Los Angeles, CA

Bachelor of Science : Applied Mathematics

GPA : 3.95 | Summa Cum Laude | Departmental Highest Honors | Phi Beta Kappa