J. Bobby Lopez

Bobby Lopez is a Consultant at Sourced Group specializing in DevOps enablement and Enterprise Cloud Computing. He is a hands-on Software Developer, Site Reliability Engineer, DevOps Practitioner, and Application Delivery Architect. Bobby has led numerous Development and Operations teams within highly regulated Financial Service Industry organizations through their Software Engineering, DevOps, and Agile journeys.

Previously, Bobby served more than 8 years in Global Support Services at VMware Inc. where he led several cross-functional teams in the development of tools to support troubleshooting, root-cause analysis, and automation for VMware's flagship product, VMware vSphere. This included VMware ESX Server and VMware Virtual Center Server. Bobby later moved on to other roles at VMware, including Business Critical Support Engineer, Lead Developer - GSS Tools Development, and Lead Developer, FAST Business Intelligence Solutions.

In 2013, Bobby joined the Capital Markets (Global Equities) division at the Royal Bank of Canada as a Senior Automation and Release Management Engineer. In 2015, he joined Ethoca Ltd. as IT Lead, DevOps and Production Operations. Bobby then served Ethoca for another 4 years as DevOps Manager, then DevOps Architect, before finally departing to join the Sourced Group as a DevOps and Cloud Consultant in 2019.

Today, Bobby primarily works with public cloud platforms such as Microsoft Azure, AWS, GCP, and has always had a passion for automation, DevOps, and Open Source software. DevOps in it's purest form is a mindset and philosophy for getting things done, quickly, efficiently, and consistently.

"What is the difference between what is happening, on the one hand, and the direction of its motion, on the other? If I am flying from London to New York, I am moving westwards even before leaving the British Coast.”

- Alan Watts, 1967
The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are

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What clients and colleagues have to say about Bobby Lopez:

"Your dedication and teamwork can be used as a model of our CIBC purpose.  Thank you!"

- Scott Sunko
Sr. Director, US Data and CRM Technology at CIBC

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"At Ethoca, where I still work, I have had the pleasure of working with Bobby on a number of different organization-transforming projects including migration from one private cloud vendor to another and from one configuration management system to another. He has shown himself to be adept at managing people and project priorities.

His technical chops also continue to impress. The tools that he builds are robust, yet lightweight and have taken a lot of friction out of the development and deployment pipeline. Many of them are still in use here after his departure, paying technical "dividends" rather than accruing technical debt.

Would happily work with him again or recommend working with him to anybody else in this industry."

- Eric Kramer
DevOps Engineer / Developer at Ethoca

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"Bobby played key role in bringing DevOps culture across teams. He provided leadership and mentorship in helping teams in adopting the DevOps ways of working. He was instrumental in improving deployment and release cycles and procedures significantly. His design for creating a fully-automated CI/CD pipeline was well received by dev teams. He was truly a hands-on devops architect who strongly believed in solving complex issues using simple tools."

- Sandeep Dhawan
Lead Developer at Ethoca

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"Bobby's creative and experienced. He has amazing development skills, in-depth knowledge of software engineering, in the meanwhile he's willing to share thoughts with the team. He is also teaching. There are lots of times I'm motivated by him to dig deeper into technologies. I'm more than glad to have Bobby as my teammate!"

I am sure he received no credit for the work he did for me, but he carefully helped me to migrate a personal internal wiki to a new wiki platform, and I still use that wiki to this day. I think of Bobby every time I use it, and I thank my stars that he was there to help me in my time of need. He is a person who goes way beyond his job description, with no public accolades. He is modest and extremely competent, and the kind of person you want at your organization. Bobby's legend lives on at VMware!"

- Tina de Benedictis
Senior Technical Marketing Manager
End User Computing at VMware

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"I have had many interactions with Mr Lopez in my time in VMware, I have always found him approachable, excellent communicator and has a drive for results. He has the ability to be able to see things from multiple angles and try to meet everybody's expectations as best as possible."

- Simon Todd
Staff Engineer and Global Technical Lead  (VSAN) at VMware

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"I had the pleasure to report directly to Bobby Lopez as a Software Developer at VMware. He helped me increase my skill set quickly in order to achieve our goals and was always very constructive and patient. He is just a great person to work with."

- Alejandro Núñez Sánchez
Software Developer and System Administrator at VMware

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"In Product Support Engineering part of our work was Automation of processes and development of tools, which were used by the whole Technical Support organization. Working with Bobby - generation or adoption of various ideas, development of different parts of the project, virtualy any side of such kind of work - was easy. And that is quite rare treat."

- Vadim Kouevda
Automation & Tools Development Manager at VMware

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"I worked with Bobby for over half a year, on a project requiring interactions at least 2-3 times a week. Bobby was always super friendly and personable, even when things got stressful. He was also extremely professional in his work.

I remember being particularly impressed by his thoughtfulness and conscientiousness in solving the inevitable problems that would crop up: he wouldn't give merely the easy answer, but the one that he felt was right and pragmatic. Definitely someone I would recommend working with."

- Simon Yu
Senior Product Manager, Product Analytics at VMware

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Articles & Publications:

• Exercising Command Line Skills: A Deep Dive into Network Connections on Linux
• The OpenTF Manifesto: A Turning Point in Open Source Licensing and Its Impact on the DevOps Community
• Getting Started with Chef Inspec on Azure Cloud Shell
• The DevOps Joint - Connecting ideas and seeing beyond the fog of DevOps and Agile confusion
• The Value of Value Stream Mapping
• How Do You Know How Good You Are?
• Why the DevOps Movement Resonates so Readily With the Idea of Empathy?
• VMInstall.com - How To Become A DevOps Engineer: Q&A Interview with Bobby Lopez

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Functional Background and Expertise:

• Problem scope analysis.  Abiliity to breakdown and understand complex enterprise software delivery systems - both their problems and proposed solutions.  Value Stream Management.
• Seasoned, hands-on software architecture and development experience. Object-oriented design experience.
• Systems integration, automation, and validation expertise in highly regulated and restricted environments.

Consulting Focus:

• DevOps and Agile Advocacy - The 3 Ways, and Agile Manifesto evangelist.
  
  
• Team Building and Sustainability - Motivating juniors, peers, and leadership on continuous improvement and continuous innovation.  Building high-performing teams using tried and true business process management frameworks and philosophies.  Leading by example.
  
  
• Infrastructure and Deployment Pipeline Architecture - Making architecture decisions based on evidence and data. Considering options based on keeping it simple. Focus on making it secure, flexible, scalable, and sustainable.
  
  
• Automation of Enterprise application deployments to various target cloud or hybrid cloud platforms (Azure, AWS, GCP), using a variety of open source and/or commercial tools and frameworks.
  
  
• Security and Compliance - Enterprise-level profiling, automation, and process optimization.

Technology, Tools, and Platform Experience:

• Cloud Platforms: Azure, AWS, GCP, Openstack, VMware, Containers
  
• Orchestration tools and platforms: Azure DevOps, Jenkins, Github, Gitlab, Chef, Puppet, Ansible, Bladelogic, API (migrations, alignment).
  
• Host Operating Systems: Redhat 7.x, 8.x, Debian, Ubuntu, Windows Server 2016/2019
• Languages: Powershell, Bash, Ruby, Python, Javascript, Perl, Go Lang
• Application Servers: JBoss, Tomcat, Websphere, Pega, Spring, Apache 2, Nginx
  
• Database Management Systems: MS SQL Server, PostgreSQL, SQLite, CouchDB, MongoDB, Apache Cassandra, Oracle RDBMS

Business Process Management Experience:

• Software Development and Operations team-building, coaching, mentoring, and managment
  
• Cloud Migration and Cloud Platform Scalability Consulting
• JIRA / Confluence Project Management and Workflow Design
• Infrastructure and Application Deployment Design and Architecture
  
• DevOps Solutions Architecture and Implementation
  

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Acknowledgements:

I have had the privilege and opportunty to gain a breadth of experience from several world-class organizations.  I have been doing both challenging and rewarding work with many highly regulated financial institutions and global technology firms for many years.  I am thankful for all the connections I have made in this industry, and the relationships which have been built as a result.

I am a strong proponent of Open Source Software.  I am also fairly indifferent with respect to cloud platforms, or development and automation tools.  I believe in developing core, cross-platform, cross-technology skill-sets that are transferable.  For me, It is important to always try and leverage cloud-native tools and services first as much as possible before considering non-native technology solutions - regardless of the platform I may be working with.  At very least, native technology solutions should always be among your design considerations.  I'm interested in keeping solutions simple, keeping costs low, and breaking through barriers in communication and understanding.

My core focus and interest is in designing and building systems that automate and orchestrate software delivery - using Agile, DevOps, and pragmatic software development.  I aim to be a Trusted Advisor for the highly regulated Financial Service Industry, or otherwise high-technology, security conscious organizations deploying mission-critical software.

I provide organisational consultation and guidance from Software Delivery Architecture, Software Delivery Engineering, and DevOps Business Process Management perspectives.  My core passion is to help our clients, partners, colleagues, and peers mature their Devops and Agile journeys on their chosen cloud platforms.

I continue to enjoy designing and building systems and software solutions that are not only functional and effective, but also simple, scalable, and highly maintainable. 

I am very thankful for the experience I have gained, and the lessons I have learned throughout my career. I am humbled by the complexity of enterprise scale software development and the technology organizations involved in doing this kind of work.  I am grateful for being given the opportunity, on so many occasions, to work with so many talented and wonderful people.

If you've read this far, then I acknowledge you and I thank you.  Please consider reaching out to discuss any aspect of DevOps, or where I may be able to help you on your DevOps and Agile journey!