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Hi, I am John

John Edwards

Associate Director of DevOps and Cloud at Jagex

A lead DevOps engineer with 14+ years experience architecting, implementing and operating mission critical services in public and hybrid cloud at the head of multi-national teams.

Leadership
DevOps
Cloud
InfoSec
Compliance
Architecture

Skills

AWS
AWS

Experience architecting, implementing, and operating mission critical SaaS platforms in AWS.
Information Security
Information Security

Hands on experince with systems hardening, vulnerability scanning and penetration testing. Authored and implemented Linguamatics’ ISO 27001 certified information security management system. Developed NIST SP 800-53 and PCI DSS standards for AWS infrastructure at Jagex.
Python Development
Python Development

Language of choice for professional development work. Ansible modules, glue code, and automation.
Systems Architecture
Systems Architecture

Architect of highly scalable, available, and secure systems.
Containerisation
Containerisation

Containerisation using Docker, AWS ECS, and AWS Fargate.
GitOps
GitOps

Familiar with Git as a VCS, and GitLab specifically as repoistory manager and CI/CD system. Experience coupling GitLab with Infrastructure-as-Code, e.g. Terraform, in GitOps change management workflows.
Linux
Linux

Deep knowledge of Linux sysadmin using Red Hat and Debian based distributions. Run of the mill GNU tools and more esoteric setups such as HA Pacemaker clusters and ZFS.
Logging and Monitoring
Logging and Monitoring

Log aggregation and monitoring with AWS CloudWatch, Elastic Stack and Graylog2. Active service monitoring with Zabbix, Nagios and CloudWatch.
Networking
Networking

Firewalls, routing, VPNs, BGP, etc.
Database Administration
Database Administration

Experience running Postgresql, Mariadb (Galera), and MongoDB databases.
Data Protection
Data Protection

Familiar with information governance in a regulated environment, e.g. HIPAA/HiTECH, PCI DSS, and GDPR.
Line Management
Line Management

Experience leading multi-national teams of motivated DevOps engineers.

Experience

1
Jagex

Sep 2021 - Present

Cambridge, UK

Associate Director, DevOps and Cloud

Dec 2023 - Present

Responsibilities:
  • Evangelist for DevOps practices and Cloud adoption
  • Product Owner for multiple internal “As a Service” offerings
  • Line management of a DevOps group
  • Application of NIST Cyber Security Framework and NIST SP 800-53 to Cloud Infrastructure
DevOps Engineering Manager

Jun 2022 - Dec 2023

Responsibilities:
  • Lead engineer for infrastructure, on-prem and cloud, underpinning Jagex’s game services
  • Line management of a DevOps group
Principal Operations Engineer

Sep 2021 - Jun 2022

Responsibilities:
  • Lead engineer for infrastructure, on-prem and cloud, underpinning Jagex’s game services
IQVIA

2019 - 2021

Cambridge, UK

IQVIA, formerly Quintiles and IMS Health, Inc., is an American multinational company serving the combined industries of health information technology and clinical research.

Director, Systems Engineering

2019 - 2021

Responsibilities:
  • Design, implementation, budget and operation of multiple mission critical SaaS offerings for IQVIA’s Real World Tech Platforms global business unit
  • Standardise working methods across wider group
  • Promote and advance adoption of SRE
  • Support development teams with CI/CD infrastructure and private cloud services
  • ISO 27001 and HIPAA compliance
  • Disaster Recovery
  • Technical guidance/systems architecture for customer RFPs
  • Lead a SRE/DevOps team of 17 engineers spread between the UK, USA and Canada
2
3
Linguamatics

2010 - 2019

Cambridge, UK

Creator of world leading Natural Language Processing software, primarily for pharmaceutical and healthcare applications.

IT/Information Security Manager

2014 - 2019

Responsibilities:
  • Design, implementation, budget and operation of mission critical SaaS offerings
  • Support development teams with CI/CD infrastructure and private cloud services
  • Enterprise IT systems (email, collaboration, end user compute, etc)
  • ISO 27001 and HIPAA compliance
  • Disaster Recovery
  • Technical guidance/systems architecture for customer RFPs
  • Lead team
Systems Administrator

2010 - 2014

Responsibilities:
  • Operation of mission critical SaaS offerings
  • Support development teams with build/test infrastructure
  • Support enterprise IT systems
iansyst

2006 - 2010

Cambridge, UK

A provider of assitive technology for disabled individuals.

Build and Automation Manager

2008 - 2010

Responsibilities:
  • Linux and Windows system administration
  • Mass computer imaging
  • Automating software installation workflow to customise 6000+ laptops per year
  • Optimising build production line
Customer Support Engineer

2006 - 2008

Responsibilities:
  • 1st and 2nd level IT help desk.
4

Achievements

Community maintainer

Start-up Contributor

Leadership

ISO 27001

PCI DSS

Site Reliability Engineering

Software-as-a-Service

Recent Posts

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CS2 Server Docker Image

When CS2 launched, I wanted to run a private tournament for my friends at Jagex. We had quite a few teams interested and so needed at least 12 servers to accomodate all of the parallel games. Rather than spinning and configuring 12 VMs, my preference was to use AWS Fargate, but for that I would need a container image for the CS2 dedicated server. None existed, so I made one, which has been adopted as the communities preferred server image.

Sunday, September 1, 2024 Read
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Fun with simple ciphers

A bit of fun playing with a simple caesar cipher in Python3. The following text has been encrypted using a simple Caesar cipher: aur r-%n!-n-p|z}#"r -"un"-p vrq9 /Z'-"rpu{vpny-ov"!-un$r-nyy-orr{-s vrq9 V-"||x-"||-zn{'-w|y"! S |z-"||-zn{'-$|y"!;;;/ 5[|-%|{qr -"ur- #qq'-"uv{t-qvrq6. Only printable characters with a unicode value >=32 and <=126 have been shifted. Any shifted character value that overflows these constraints is is wrapped to the opposite end of the range. The code I wrote to encrypt, decrypt and brute force this cipher can be found on my GitHub.

Friday, May 21, 2021 Read
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Ubuntu Multi-seat Steam Streaming Server

My wife and I like to play games together. Before kids, we had two gaming PCs with their own desks etc, but there isn’t room in the house for that kind of setup these days. I decided to setup a single dedicated gaming server based on Ubuntu 18.04 which would use the Remote Play feature of Steam to stream games to our much lower spec Ubuntu laptops. This setup has some cool benefits:

Sunday, February 7, 2021 Read