Nate Ferrell
10x AWS Certified || Architecture, Performance, Resiliency, Governance, Security
Nate lives in Allen, TX with his wife, 3 kids and their 2 dogs. He is passionate about non-profits, productivity, DevOps, and enabling everyone around him. Outside of the office and IDE, he’s typically building mechanical keyboards, tinkering with synthesizers and drum machines, taking photos with his wife, or exploring both virtual and real worlds with the kids.
- Location
- Allen, TX, United States
- [email protected]
- Website
- https://ferrell.io/
Volunteer Work
- present
Resident Architect & Technical Advisor at Issara Institute
As a Resident Architect and Technical Advisor, I am responsible for working with the Issara Institute to help them optimize for cost and security in their cloud infrastructure. This includes working with their development team to build out their CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure-as-code, and serverless architectures. I also work with their development team to build out their monitoring and observability strategies, as well as their security and compliance strategies.
Highlights
- Designed Infrastructure-as-Code implementation strategy using AWS CDK, resulting in unifying the infrastructure configurations across all environments and removing the need for manual configuration changes.
- Trained technical team members on AWS best practices, including IAM roles and policies, security groups, and VPC design.
- Assisted with business resiliency strategy definition and implementation.
- Assisted with planning and execution of migration to right-sized infrastructure resources for cost optimization.
Work Experience
- present
Senior DevOps Architect, Consultant at AWS Professional Services - Global Financial Services
As a Senior DevOps Architect, I am responsible for working with customers to enable their DevOps culture and practices. This includes working with customers to build out their CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure-as-code, and serverless architectures. I also work with customers to build out their monitoring and observability strategies, as well as their security and compliance strategies. This role is a mix of hands-on development, mentoring, and consulting.
Highlights
- Re-architected AWSLabs' Automated Security Helper (ASH) to run a single container, including adding support for ARM alongside AMD64 platforms, as well as enabling ASH scanning capabilities in any Continuous Integration runtime where Linux containers are supported. Link: https://github.com/awslabs/automated-security-helper
- Designed and implemented a non-functional requirement testing framework for a global financial services customer using FastAPI (Python), JMeter, Locust, K6, and Chaos Toolkit running on Amazon EKS, AWS Lambda, and Amazon Step Functions to validate the performance, resiliency, and disaster recovery processes of customer applications and supporting AWS services.
- Architected cross-region and cross-account backup solution using AWS Backup, Amazon KMS, and AWS Organizations to enable a global financial services customer to meet their compliance requirements for data retention and disaster recovery.
- Led design and implementation of DevOps process reapproach for a global financial services customer, including gap analysis for Infrastructure-as-Code coverage across the existing enterprise, planning and development to enable migration to Terraform Enterprise, and strategic planning for future state CI/CD pipelines.
- present
Founder at Secret Headquarters, LLC
Secret Headquarters (a.k.a. SCRT HQ), founded by Nate Ferrell in 2015 and incorporated in 2024, is focused on building tools and processes to help organizations and individuals automate and streamline their workflows. Our goal is to be your “secret headquarters” that you can leverage to amplify your effectiveness and efficiency. We especially love working with non-profits and other organizations that are focused on making the world a better place. We believe that technology can be a powerful force for good, and we want to help you harness that power to make a positive impact in the world. Please reach out if you think we can help you with your mission!
Highlights
- Developed VaporShell, a PowerShell module to assist in AWS CloudFormation template building and stack management.
- Developed vscode-gitter, the first extension for Visual Studio Code to send code snippets/files directly to Gitter from the editor
- Developed PSGSuite, a PowerShell module that wraps Google's various API's, enabling automation capabilities with G Suite / Google Drive for system administrators
- As of January 5th, 2025, PowerShellGallery.com shows 195 packages published with 264,968 total packages downloaded: https://www.powershellgallery.com/profiles/nferrell
-
VP, Architect, Cloud Platform Engineering at Pennymac
Started as an Operations Engineer, moved to Systems Engineer, then Sr. Systems/DevOps Engineer, and finally to VP, Architect, Cloud Platform Engineering. As a member of the Cloud Platform Engineering team, I was the owner, developer and SME for multiple cloud platforms such as Azure DevOps, Chef, Amazon Web Services, GitLab/GitLab CI, and Google Cloud Platform. As an architect, I was also involved in architectural reviews and system design. My daily workload shifts between writing Python, Ruby, PowerShell, and Bash across CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure-as-code. I also work hand-in-hand with development teams across the organization daily, gathering feedback in order to provide the best platforms for them to build upon. When I was not writing code, I was usually mentoring or working on documentation.
Highlights
- Enabled self-service capabilities for developers to create build and release pipelines that could deploy all the way to production while ensuring all guardrails for security and change management were enforced.
- Enabled easier shifting from legacy, monolithic .NET code bases to FaaS and containers running .NET Core / Python via centralized CI/CD pipeline templates.
- Migrated the company's largest development division from TFS 2015 to Azure DevOps Server 2020.1.1.
- Built out a multi-tier Azure DevOps Server environment to increase internal development agility.
- Built patterns for consuming secrets securely from AWS Secrets Manager from CloudFormation before it was supported.
- Established full CloudFormation support for Amazon Connect to enable our Servicing team to treat customer-contact centers as code and align with a traditional SDLC, including routing, bots and queue management as code.
- Automated malicious email quarantine and notification to dramatically decrease risk of infection to end users.
- Integrated SQL server job failures with ServiceNow's Event Management.
- Implemented custom automation to manage entitlement provisioning in various systems where there was no way to accomplish it out-of-the-box.
- Developed automation for provisioning/deprovisioning resources in Google and Active Directory to meet SLAs.
- Automated email collection via Gmail API for customer-contact tracking and productivity metrics.
- Automated multiple processes for my team that were previously manual tasks.
- Built a Windows Rundeck node to fill a knowledge gap and enable other team members to easily run jobs and scripts in a safe, contained environment.
-
Enterprise Sales & Support Engineer at Broadvoice
As a Sales and Support Engineer for our enterprise customers, I was involved with working with our Sales team to information around the technical implementation of the hardware, software and overall service we provided as a VoIP company. Our customers were ours for the length of their contract as well, we were their dedicated TAMs after signing.
Highlights
- Originally hired as a Tier I technician, assigned to the routing department while still in the probation period due to skills shown with identifying routing issues with deep packet inspection.
- Chosen within the first 6 months of employment to move up to our select business engineering department due to the ability to absorb knowledge quickly and eagerness to learn and expand my skill-set. Chosen out of a pool of ~60 residential technical support agents to move up to the much smaller business department, most of which had been at the company considerably longer than myself at that point.
AWS Learning: Serverless from Amazon Web Services (AWS)
AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner from Amazon Web Services (AWS)
AWS Certified AI Practitioner from Amazon Web Services (AWS)
AWS Certified Machine Learning Engineer - Associate from Amazon Web Services (AWS)
AWS Certified Data Engineer - Associate from Amazon Web Services (AWS)
AWS Certified Developer - Associate from Amazon Web Services (AWS)
AWS Certified SysOps Administrator - Associate from Amazon Web Services (AWS)
AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate from Amazon Web Services (AWS)
AWS Certified DevOps Engineer - Professional from Amazon Web Services (AWS)
AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional from Amazon Web Services (AWS)
AWS Certified Security - Specialty from Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Google Apps Certified Administrator from Google
New Relic Certified Performance Pro from New Relic University
Languages
- English
- Fluency: Fluent
- Spanish
- Fluency: Intermediate
Interests
- Technical Leadership
- Keywords:
- Developer Advocacy
- Keywords:
- Mentoring
- Keywords:
- Continuous Growth
- Keywords:
Skills
- Full Stack Development
- Level: IntermediateKeywords:
- Python
- Level: ExpertKeywords:
- Scripting
- Level: ExpertKeywords:
- DevOps Tools, Culture, and Practices
- Level: ExpertKeywords:
- Version Control
- Level: ExpertKeywords:
- CI/CD
- Level: ExpertKeywords:
- Infrastructure as Code
- Level: ExpertKeywords:
- Cloud Platforms
- Level: ExpertKeywords:
- Containers
- Level: ExpertKeywords:
- Serverless Architecture
- Level: ExpertKeywords:
