Angus Lees is one of our Senior Engineers who works remotely from Australia.
I have been lucky enough to spend my entire career working with Linux and Free Software (since 1995), and in a lot of ways Bitnami is a return to my early interests.
From early university days running the Linux user group “installfests”, I have been a proud member of the Debian project since about 2000. From university, I worked for a string of small Australian companies as a sysadmin / programmer / everything-else-guy. One of the more interesting projects involved driving over sand dunes in the hottest Australian desert to install our Linux-based routers on poles with solar panels and a two-way satellite dish.
In 2005, I moved to Ireland to work for Google on one of the original SRE teams. We looked after the main search engine and common networking infrastructure. I and 2 others built ipv6.google.com and as part of the following rollout, my home was the first place to ever receive a AAAA response from www.google.com. I eventually moved back to the new Google Sydney office to work on a new storage system and finally as a team lead and manager for some of the parts of the new Google cloud overlay network.
By this point, it was becoming obvious that a number of the engineering candidates I was interviewing were mentioning projects and tools that I had never heard of. My eldest daughter was about to start university and talked about leaving home soon, and so I took the rather unusual step of leaving Google to work from home on OpenStack with Rackspace. I accidentally got involved in Kubernetes quite early (v0.15) by writing the Kubernetes OpenStack cloud provider plugin and some related pieces and really enjoyed the experience. The opportunity to work on Kubernetes full time for Bitnami came up and I jumped at it.
Why did you join Bitnami and what excites you about working here?
I have always had a fascination with compilers, toolchains, and the low-level details of how applications interact with kernel and hardware. Bitnami has been working in this space for many years, and so it seemed an obvious fit.
For me, Bitnami is almost the perfect combination of: working from home, on free software, on something new and exciting, without big corporate bureaucracy, and with an excellent bunch of colleagues.
What are you working on?
I am currently working on “ksonnet” - a set of related tools to make it easier to manage more complex services on Kubernetes. This grew out of personal experience setting up and managing multiple internal Kubernetes clusters within Bitnami, and a decade of something similar within Google. I feel Kubernetes is rapidly moving from “demo” to “production” for many people, so I am happy to be able to share tools and a workflow that can really take advantage of the Kubernetes design.
What do you like to do for fun?
I like food. I have a small vegetable garden and a few chickens. With no daily commute, I like to spend that little bit of extra time in the evenings cooking and enjoying a nice meal with my family.
I have never been a sporting person, but I have also recently started playing soccer/football.