Network engineering and connectivity
Before cloud I did telecom — 4G and LTE rollout, MPLS, and Alcatel-Lucent 7750 SR service routers. That background is why cloud networking problems tend not to surprise me.
Scope
What I take on
Hybrid connectivity
Joining an office, a data centre and a cloud estate together without creating one flat network where everything can reach everything.
Segmentation
VPC and subnet design, security groups and routing that reflect an actual trust model rather than whatever was quickest at the time.
VPN estates
pfSense, WireGuard and OpenVPN — site-to-site and remote access, built to be operated rather than admired.
Load balancing and failover
HAProxy and Keepalived for services that cannot afford a single point of failure.
Method
How it runs
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01
Draw the real topology
Almost every network engagement starts by discovering the diagram is out of date. That discovery is usually the most valuable week.
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02
Default deny, then open deliberately
Segmentation is only worth anything if the default is closed. Retrofitting that is work, but it is finite work.
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03
Document it for the person on call
A network nobody but you can reason about is a liability, however elegant it is.
Evidence
Where this has been done before
- Patchman Scaled Redis, PostgreSQL and Nginx for high availability using Keepalived and HAProxy across a Linode estate.
- Alcatel-Lucent / Nokia 4G and LTE rollout and network monitoring, then telecom KPI data work — MPLS and 7750 SR at carrier scale.
- Certification CCNA (Routing & Switching), Cisco Security Green Belt, and Alcatel-Lucent Certified Field Expert in MPLS and 7750 SR.
Fit
Probably worth a conversation if
- Your cloud network grew organically and is now effectively flat.
- You need a site-to-site or remote-access VPN estate someone can actually maintain.
- A hybrid setup needs joining up without opening everything to everything.
- You want a segmentation model designed once, by someone who did this before cloud.
Contact
Tell me what is actually broken
The contact details live on the front page. If I am not the right person for this, I will say so.