Background

I started in 1997 as a Linux systems administrator, running my own small business in Rennes, France. From 1999 to 2004, I administered Solaris and GNU/Linux servers along with WebSphere and WebLogic application servers, then moved on to viaFrance. In 2006, I founded Alixnet, through which I worked for IBM Global Services (level-3 WebSphere support), Orange Business Services (deploying JEE applications on Solaris) and EDF-GDF (Solaris administration). Those years taught me the core of the job: understand a system before you change it.

At RTL, I administered Solaris 10 and 11, Tomcat and Glassfish application servers, Varnish caches, Hitachi SAN storage, and Oracle 11g RAC, Sybase ASE (on Sun Cluster) and PostgreSQL databases. At Orange Business Services, I built the methods for deploying Solaris 10 and 11 in production, migrated LDOMs on T-series servers, benchmarked M5000 and M9000 systems and validated Oracle T4 platforms. That is where I learned the discipline of environments where downtime is expensive.

I then took on engagements in Ireland, France, Moldova and Switzerland: automated deployments with Ansible and Rundeck, FreeBSD and Debian servers, pfSense networking, Icinga monitoring and, twice, coordinating remote development teams. At AXA in Lausanne, I deployed Mirantis OpenStack on OpenCompute hardware, set up Proxmox servers, introduced StackStorm for event-driven automation and prepared the migration of KVM servers to LXD.

At OVH in Rennes, I wrote a Go command-line tool to manage OVH services through their API, and administered a Mesos/Marathon/Docker infrastructure and a Graylog/Elasticsearch platform. At Cozy Cloud, I deployed and ran an OpenStack Swift object-storage cluster and CouchDB clusters, and automated the development, integration, staging and production environments.

As CTO of yourITcity, I designed a microservices backend (Node.js, then Go), built with Packer and Terraform and orchestrated with Nomad, on FreeBSD and Linux, on OVH Public Cloud. I then worked as a cloud consultant at SolarStein, helping development teams move to a PaaS such as Clever Cloud so they could focus on their code. In 2020, as CTO of Neuva, I led a team of 6 developers, managed projects with clients and designed the hosting infrastructure for a healthcare application in an HDS-certified (French health-data hosting) environment at OVH.

Alongside this, from 2019 to 2022, I was a trainer at École 404, teaching GNU/Linux administration, IT automation, security, network administration and OVH Cloud.

From December 2020 to September 2023, I worked as a freelance DevOps/SRE: infrastructure on OVH Public Cloud and Scaleway, OpenStack installation, automation with Rudder, Rundeck, GitLab CI, Terraform and Packer, and monitoring with Zabbix and Prometheus/Grafana. I also helped development teams move to Clever Cloud.

Since December 2021, I have been an SRE at Lempire, the company behind lemlist, working full remote from France.