Nate Ferrell
Developer Advocate, Systems Architect, Cloud Platform Engineer
Nate lives in Allen, TX with his wife, kids and their 4 fur children. He is passionate about productivity, DevOps culture, and enabling his peers. Outside of the office and IDE, he’s typically building mechanical keyboards, taking photos with his wife, or figuring out who makes the best T-Rex impression between the boys.
- Location
- Allen, TX, United States
- Website
- https://ferrell.io/
Experience
VP, Architect, Cloud Platform Engineering at PennyMac Loan Services, LLC
As a member of the Cloud Platform Engineering team, I am 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 am 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 am not writing code, I am 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.
Sr. Systems/DevOps Engineer at PennyMac Loan Services, LLC
As a senior Systems and DevOps engineer, my primary focus was working with development teams building infrastructure-as-code and maintaining CI/CD pipelines. I was also responsible for maintaining our identity platforms such as OneLogin, Active Directory, and AWS IAM, as well as involved with our architectural review committee. My daily workload involved heavy Python for infrastructure-as-code and supporting microservices, Ruby for configuration management, and PowerShell and Bash for CI/CD and general automation depending on the OS I am working on.
Highlights
- 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.
Systems Engineer at PennyMac Loan Services, LLC
As a Systems Engineer, my primary focus was building and maintaining our Windows Server infrastructure across both our on-premises data centers running vSphere as well as AWS. I was also the primary owner/admin for our Google Workspace domain, including automating much of that via PSGSuite. My daily workload primarily focused on PowerShell for automating deployments and anything else, Ruby for configuration management via Chef, and Python for writing infrastructure-as-code. I was also heavily involved with automating tasks and reporting surrounding Active Directory.
Highlights
- 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.
Operations Engineer at PennyMac Loan Services, LLC
As an Operations Engineer, my primary focus was monitoring, troubleshooting and escalating issues that occurred across our infrastructure. While I was in this role, I moved from graveyard to swing to day shift where the responsibilities differed significantly. My time was spent primarily writing PowerShell and Python in order to make the daily manual tasks easier to perform so I could focus on learning more PowerShell and Python. I was in only this initial position for a short period of time until I was promoted to Systems Engineer and had my workload adjusted based on performance.
Highlights
- 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.
Founder/Developer at SCRT HQ
SCRT HQ (Secret Headquarters) is an organization that I started to house the personal projects that I am developing. These are primarily PowerShell modules that I felt would be mutually beneficial for the general public as well as myself/my workplace, created out of either a current need in my role or pure curiosity. Most of the modules that I publish are REST API wrappers or .NET SDK wrappers, although I do have a number of modules I have yet to push that are for more Windows-admin centric tasks.
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
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.
Certifications
AWS Certified Developer - Associate from Amazon Web Services
Validation Number: Z076ERWKJN4411SR
AWS Certified SysOps Administrator - Associate from Amazon Web Services
Validation Number: 0F95E11KB1BQ175E
AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate from Amazon Web Services
Validation Number: 9MEFH7TC12VQ1151
Certified Performance Pro from New Relic
License 10979094
Certified G Suite Administrator from Google
Skills
- Programming
- Level: IntermediateKeywords:
- DevOps
- Level: ExpertKeywords:
- Version Control
- Level: ExpertKeywords:
- CI/CD
- Level: ExpertKeywords:
- Cloud Platforms
- Level: ExpertKeywords:
- Containers
- Level: IntermediateKeywords:
- Serverless Architecture
- Level: ExpertKeywords:
Interests
- Developer Advocacy
- Keywords:
- Mentoring
- Keywords:
- Continuous Growth
- Keywords:
