Alex Kiousis

Worked as a systems engineer in a team of 8-10 people that managed GRNET’s vast Data Center infrastructure, it’s Cloud offering and large-scale web services that facilitate the needs of the academic and scientific community in Greece.

Technical Responsibilities

• Datacenter:
• Physical Server Provisioning with FAI/PXE deploying Debian Servers
• Full Hardware Lifecycle Handling from deployment to decommission
• Large-scale Storage Appliance (Netapp,EMC,IBM Spectrum Scale) administration
• Cloud:
• Public Cloud Infrastructure spanning hundreds of hypervisor nodes and thousands of VMs
• In-house IAAS installation based on Ganeti and homegrown tools (~okeanos, ViMa)
• Multiple large-scale Ceph clusters for Cloud and Object Storage (RBD, RadosGateway)
• Services:
• Designing the architecture for Public Web Services (Eudoxus, BDR, HARMONI, Copernicus)
• Maintaining web services built with Java (Wildfly), Python (Django), PHP and Ruby
• Implementing CI/CD solutions for automated deployment for above services
• Facilitating AAI (SAML-based SSO Federation) , Security (CERT) and Network (FirewallOnDemand) Services with the relevant teams
• Maintaining internal services for GRNET (JIRA, Sentry, Gitlab, Mail, DNS,Piwik)
• Developing and maintaining in-house network applications (Django-based network automation tools)
• Tooling:
• Central Configuration Management for all infrastructure with Puppet/Mcollective/Ansible
• Automated system Backups with Bacula, centralized log aggregation with ELK and rsyslog
• Automatically configured Monitoring infrastructure with Icinga/CheckMK and Prometheus
• Support Tools for NOC (VPN,Mail,XMPP,wiki) and other teams (Nextcloud,email,Confluence)
• CI/CD with Jenkins/GitlabCI, Docker-based Wordpress hosting and private registry (Harbor)

Supervising Responsibilities

• Outlining the team’s long-term goals
• Managing 8-person team handling GRNET’s infrastructure
• Handling of day-to-day task assignments

As part of my military obligations, I administered infrastructure for CDD. This included maintenance of some internal PHP services and a prototype of a networking setup for CTF infrastructure.

Team lead at the student-managed computer laboratories of University of Piraeus CS department. Part-time volunteer position during my studies.

• Workstation domain build on Samba/OpenLDAP running Windows and Linux
• Server management for students support server (Web / Mail / FTP server) and faculty services
• Public server management based on virtualization infrastructure (Xen / KVM)