Clint Armstrong
IT Systems and Operations engineer with expertise in building and maintaining business critical infrastructure in a variety of environments. Utilizing open source software I build reliable systems and networks that empower businesses to be more agile and do more with less. Programming experience building solutions in Go, Python and Rust.
Work Experience
- 11/2020 - 08/2023
- Director of Decentralized Storage W3BCLOUD, Las Vegas, NV (Remote)
- Head engineer responsible for storage and networking
- Automated deployment and operations using Ansible and custom management sofware written in Go
- Coordianted multiple datacenter deployment projects, from datacenter contract negotations through to final turn-up
- Designed, deployed and sole operations engineer for a 20PiB storage
cluster participating in the Filecoin network
- Multiple storage backends and protocols including Ceph, ZFS and NFS
- Filecoin operations included cluster of over 100 high performance GPUs runnning cryptographic operations.
- Low level CPU scheduling optimizations for CPU bound cryptographic operations
- Multiple contributions to the filecoin project to optimize our deployment
- Designed and operated large network of GPUs for blockchain validation
- Implemented network booting for over 20,000 machines across 2 datacenters
- Built a cost efficient network utilizing commodity linux servers as routers, and budget layer 2 switches
- Built tooling to automate naming and locating machines using LLDP
- Provided secure network segmentation and VPN access for engineers using open source tools
- 01/2015 - 10/2020
- DevOps Engineer Trillium Staffing, Kalamazoo, MI
- Head engineer responsible for networking, servers and cloud services.
- Facilitated a corporate big-data initiative building an open source, hyperconverged cluster on top of Nomad, Docker, and Ceph, and wrote several plugins and contributions to these projects to integrate them.
- Replaced a Cisco hub-and-spoke branch VPN solution with a full mesh DMVPN between over 100 branch offices using Linux on commodity hardware.
- Achieved datacenter IP redundancy using Linux to peer with multiple ISPs and announce provider independent IP space via BGP.
- Introduced and standardized configuration management on a wide deployment of Linux servers improving security and maintainability.
- 12/2011 - 01/2015
- Professional Services Engineer Secant Technologies, Kalamazoo, MI
- On-Site and Remote consulting, support and engineering.
- Frequently engaged to perform infrastructure upgrades of SANs, datacenter switches and vSphere clusters.
- Performed migration projects for business services including email, databases and identity.
- 01/2011 - 12/2011
- Microsoft Systems Administrator Liberty University, Lynchburg, VA
- Responsible for design and maintenance of Active Directory, Exchange,
and all other critical Microsoft services.
- Migrated a 350,000 user environment from Exchange 2007 to a hybrid Office 365 and Exchange 2010 deployment.
Clint Armstrong
Work Experience (continued)
- 2008 - 2011
- Desktop Configuration Administrator Liberty University, Lynchburg, VA
- Managed the centralized configuration of over 5000 workstations across
campus.
- Implemented and managed Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager 2007 for management of over 5000 workstations.
- Implemented Microsoft Windows Deployment Services with a custom front-end to provide advanced automated imaging workflows for Support Technicians.
- 2008
- Desk-Side Support Technician Liberty University, Lynchburg, VA
- On-Site support technician
- 2005 - 2007
- IT Technician Comstock Public Schools, Kalamazoo, MI
- Remote and on-site support technician
Open Source
- See my complete portfolio of open source work at https://github.com/clinta/.
- filecoin lotus
- The official filecoin implementation. Contributed improvements to worker scheduling.
- filecoin rust proofs
- Storage proofs for the filecoin network. Contributed improvements to CPU core scheduling to make prooving compatible with systemd resource limits.
- vxrouter
- A docker network and IPAM plugin that connects containers to VXLANs using MacVLAN devices. Designed to be used with a routing protocol like BGP to coordinate IPAM across a cluster of hosts.
- go-multiping
- An ICMP library designed to ping multiple hosts efficiently in go. Improves on existing libraries by pinging multiple hosts while using a single raw-socket in the kernel.
- updog
- A simple monitoring system that uses HTTP or TCP checks and logs data to Bosun.
- iputil
- A go library for common operations on IP addresses.
- go-zfs
- A go library for manipulating ZFS filesystems.
- salt-pwgen
- A salt module for generating random passwords and storing them in pass.
- salt
- Wrote the x509 module and contributed several bug fixes.
- containernetworking/plugins (CNI Networking)
- Added functionality for managing mac addresses of connected containers