Hello! Could someone please review my
SOP guidelines provided by the program: mse.isri.cmu.edu/0_documents/statement-of-purpose-guidelines.pdf
Experience and Background:
I completed my Bachelors in Computer Science and Engineering from Vellore Institute of Technology and upon fulfilment of my education, I got recruited by Bank of America as a Software Engineer. I'm currently working as part of the Infrastructure Automation Team at the Bank which uses BMC TrueSight Orchestrator to provide IT Service Orchestration by automating routine operational procedures such as remediation of incidents associated with a monitoring event and schedule/trigger ad-hoc activities. My team follows Agile methodologies and DevOps tools such as Git and BitBucket for development and release management.
The most complex project that I have been involved with during my tenure at Bank of America is 'Enterprise Patching Automation Service'; abbreviated as EPAS through which server patching is automated in an end-to-end fashion. The team comprises of 6 developers spread out globally. With EPAS, server patching is scheduled automatically upon detection of software updates for various packages and a change is created in BMC IT Service Management (ITSM). During patching, BMC TrueSight Orchestrator would integrate with Bladelogic via Network Shell Scripts to deploy packages on target servers. Upon completion of patching, reports are consolidated in a database and sent out to the application owners. Post deployment, continuous efforts are made by the team for constant up-keeping of this project to achieve superlative efficiency. I'm currently working on extending EPAS towards middleware patching, firmware upgrades, database patching and Venafi Certificate renewals. The major challenge that my team faced during the development of EPAS was building a seamless integration of TSO with multiple other tools without creating too many dependencies to cut down chances of miscommunication during maintenance activities. To overcome this hurdle, we maintain a Health Check Automation which runs in a scheduled manner and constantly monitors all the integration points. If the Health Check Automation detects any anomaly, it immediately switches the integration over to the secondary connection and runs remediation scripts to bring up the primary connection thus maintaining 100% resiliency.
Another elaborate project that I have been a part of was 'Automated Release Management'. A virtual team of 4 engineers was ascribed the task to streamline the team's release process which formerly required the developers to stage and activate the required modules on all production servers sequentially during every code release. This process was time-consuming and monotonous while exposing the production grids to violations and vulnerabilities. A new and robust functionality was introduced in the Automation Portal with limited access which would perform all the release activities with a single click. I was responsible for the development of Ansible playbooks which would make use of TSO Repository APIs and stage the required modules on all production servers simultaneously without having developers to connect to those servers directly thus safeguarding production instances from manual access.
I've also been entrusted with the task of performing 'Proof of Concept' around integrating several tools into development workflows such as Appdynamics, Tanium and Autosys resulting in an expansive set automation use-cases. Additionally, I am well versed in C++/XPath/XSLT/SQL and using Git for version control.
One essay in one thread. No external links please.
SOP for CMU's MSE program
?SOP guidelines provided by the program: mse.isri.cmu.edu/0_documents/statement-of-purpose-guidelines.pdf
Experience and Background:
I completed my Bachelors in Computer Science and Engineering from Vellore Institute of Technology and upon fulfilment of my education, I got recruited by Bank of America as a Software Engineer. I'm currently working as part of the Infrastructure Automation Team at the Bank which uses BMC TrueSight Orchestrator to provide IT Service Orchestration by automating routine operational procedures such as remediation of incidents associated with a monitoring event and schedule/trigger ad-hoc activities. My team follows Agile methodologies and DevOps tools such as Git and BitBucket for development and release management.
The most complex project that I have been involved with during my tenure at Bank of America is 'Enterprise Patching Automation Service'; abbreviated as EPAS through which server patching is automated in an end-to-end fashion. The team comprises of 6 developers spread out globally. With EPAS, server patching is scheduled automatically upon detection of software updates for various packages and a change is created in BMC IT Service Management (ITSM). During patching, BMC TrueSight Orchestrator would integrate with Bladelogic via Network Shell Scripts to deploy packages on target servers. Upon completion of patching, reports are consolidated in a database and sent out to the application owners. Post deployment, continuous efforts are made by the team for constant up-keeping of this project to achieve superlative efficiency. I'm currently working on extending EPAS towards middleware patching, firmware upgrades, database patching and Venafi Certificate renewals. The major challenge that my team faced during the development of EPAS was building a seamless integration of TSO with multiple other tools without creating too many dependencies to cut down chances of miscommunication during maintenance activities. To overcome this hurdle, we maintain a Health Check Automation which runs in a scheduled manner and constantly monitors all the integration points. If the Health Check Automation detects any anomaly, it immediately switches the integration over to the secondary connection and runs remediation scripts to bring up the primary connection thus maintaining 100% resiliency.
Another elaborate project that I have been a part of was 'Automated Release Management'. A virtual team of 4 engineers was ascribed the task to streamline the team's release process which formerly required the developers to stage and activate the required modules on all production servers sequentially during every code release. This process was time-consuming and monotonous while exposing the production grids to violations and vulnerabilities. A new and robust functionality was introduced in the Automation Portal with limited access which would perform all the release activities with a single click. I was responsible for the development of Ansible playbooks which would make use of TSO Repository APIs and stage the required modules on all production servers simultaneously without having developers to connect to those servers directly thus safeguarding production instances from manual access.
I've also been entrusted with the task of performing 'Proof of Concept' around integrating several tools into development workflows such as Appdynamics, Tanium and Autosys resulting in an expansive set automation use-cases. Additionally, I am well versed in C++/XPath/XSLT/SQL and using Git for version control.
One essay in one thread. No external links please.