AHADLEY(1) Infrastructure Engineer's Manual AHADLEY(1)

NAME

Aaron Hadley

Infrastructure engineer at Amazon Web Services. Linux, automation, security and networking. Keeping production systems quiet since 2010.

ahadley --linux --automation --security [--networking] <problem>

fig. 1 — the author

DESCRIPTION

I started in 2010 on a support desk at Kroger, as the team lead other analysts went to when an incident got complicated. At Interactive Northwest I moved through QA into technical services: building virtual infrastructure and storage, running firewalls and on-call, and hardening Linux to DISA STIG standards.

I joined Amazon Web Services in 2016 as a systems engineer and spent the next several years building tooling and automation for one of the largest networks in the world. In 2021 I took a turn as an engineering manager, then went back to hands-on engineering. Today I'm an engineer on Amazon Dedicated Cloud.

I like systems that are boring in production, tools that make the next person faster, and teams where everyone's voice counts.

OPTIONS

--linux
Since my first install at eleven. Mostly Red Hat-family systems: troubleshooting, tuning and hardening.
--automation
Python, Bash and infrastructure as code. Deployment and operations tooling that removes toil.
--security
DISA STIG hardening and remediation, vulnerability scanning. CompTIA Security+.
--networking
Firewalls, VPN and remote access early on; tooling for very large networks at AWS.
--lead
Managed an engineering team at AWS, 2021–2022. Mentoring, on-call escalation, leading technical discussions.

HISTORY2010 → now

  1. 2023–nowAmazon Dedicated Cloud EngineerAWS
  2. 2022–2023Systems Development EngineerAWS
  3. 2021–2022Systems Development ManagerAWS
  4. 2017–2021Systems Development EngineerAWS
  5. 2016–2017Systems EngineerAWS
  6. 2013–2016Technical Services EngineerInteractive Northwest
    • Designed and ran virtual environments, network storage, firewalls and remote access.
    • Hardened and remediated systems to DISA STIG; ran vulnerability scanning.
    • Built deployment and integration tooling in Java, Python and Bash. Ran a weekly company-wide Linux lunch forum.
  7. 2012–2013Quality Assurance and TestingInteractive Northwest
    • Wrote and ran test plans; validated use cases and end-user experience.
    • Reviewed and published customer-facing documentation.
  8. 2010–2012Senior Support Center AnalystKroger
    • Team lead for incident management across desktop, POS, telephony, network, mainframe and servers.
    • Built .NET tools for support agents; ran Avaya CMS reporting; kept the knowledge base.

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