Fabrizio Furnari

Profile

Former GNU/Linux System Administrator, now SRE. Debian enthusiast. I like to be always in touch with new technologies and experiment with new stuff. In my spare time, I love to play music and dedicate myself to non-profit causes.

Experience

Wikimedia Foundation

Remote

Senior Site Reliability Engineer, Traffic

May 2023 - Present

  • The Traffic team is responsible for WMF’s critical first layer infrastructure, that all user traffic passes through, for all services. This work includes TLS termination (securely encrypting/decrypting web requests), multi-layered caching (both in-memory and on-disk caching to reduce request latency and offload our application servers for a majority of requests), load balancing (distributing requests across multiple servers and ensuring availability of the Foundation’s projects) and GeoDNS (routing user requests to the closest of our caching PoPs to improve request latency). A lot of attack mitigations (e.g. for (D)DoS attacks) are also engineered at this layer.
  • https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/SRE/Traffic

Immobiliare.it

Rome, IT

SRE Team Leader

Dec 2020 - May 2023

  • Responsible for a team of 10+ people (System Administrators, DevOps, System Developers).
  • Partecipate in Product and Software Development decision meetings to ensure the requirements from all parts are understandable and achievable. Define infrastructures for new products and services. Coach team members to plan highly-available and resilient web (and sometimes non-web) architectures.
  • Help setup of new provisioning and configuration management framweork based on Terraform and Ansible (migration from SaltStack) to easily deploy and reproduce environments and products.
  • Manage live migration of services between old and new DC with minimum or null service disruption.
  • Ansible
  • Terraform
  • Prometheus (basic)
  • Apache Trafficserver (basic)
  • K8S/K3S (basic)

Head of Application Infrastructure

Nov 2019 - Dec 2020

  • Lead a team of 4 people (Jr/Sr System Administrators). Mentored and guided new employees to ensure all were aligned on product knowledge and procedures.
  • Defining and promoting deployment best practices for developers and system administrator.
  • Design and build scalable and higly-available infrastructures to host the internal web products. Setup monitoring probes to track software and systems behavior and improve troubleshooting.
  • Write and deploy small applications for automation and service management. Setup a review-app environment based on GitLab and HashiCorp Nomad for rapid application testing and prototyping.
  • Development of small applications, mainly with Go and Python.
  • Promote and encourage use of FOSS whenever possible.
  • OpenStack
  • Graphite
  • Grafana
  • HAProxy
  • Go
  • GitLab
  • Nomad

Sr. System Administrator

Feb 2016 - Nov 2019

  • Setup the SaltStack codebase for 1000+ hosts management, both virtual and physical, mostly adapting existing configuration for live services.
  • Managing the availability and reliability of the largest Italian Real Estate website, including network appliances and databases.
  • Planning and implementing new architectures to host the in-house built software.
  • Strong collaboration with the internal Software Development team to ship new products and features daily in a reliable environment.
  • Planning and setup of new US POS for one of the biggest luxury real estate portal (LuxuryEstate.com). The infrastructure has been redesigned and optimized to leverage the physical to cloud advantages. Geographical sync and replication of main services.
  • On-call rotation, migrating all monitored services from Nagios to Zabbix.
  • Debian
  • VMWare
  • oVirt
  • Percona SQL Server
  • Python
  • SaltStack
  • Zabbix

Trust Italia SpA

Rome, IT

Sr. System Administrator

Aug 2015 - Feb 2016

  • Upgrading, securing and automating the deploy of the whole IT infrastructure (Debian, RedHat)
  • PBX and network appliances management (FreePBX, Cisco Catalyst, Fortigate)
  • MPKI/HSM management.
  • Setup of HA infrastructures for internally built software (mainly web).
  • Debian
  • RedHat
  • Ansible
  • Fabric
  • Glassfish
  • HAProxy
  • Apache
  • MySQL

Venere.com (part of Expedia Inc)

Rome, IT

Jr./Sr. System Administrator

Feb 2009 - Aug 2015

  • Installation and configuration of several hundreds Ubuntu/Debian/RH hosts, physical and virtual.
  • Defining provision and automation procedures, server customization and tailoring in order to comply with the software development model (SCRUM).
  • Installation and management of HA systems in a web-oriented infrastructure (Apache, PHP, Tomcat).
  • Monitoring of hundreds hosts/application in critical (24/7) production environment. Setup of alerting and reporting systems.
  • Debian
  • LAMP
  • Puppet
  • VMWare
  • Zabbix

Education

High school leaving qualification

Liceo Scientifico I. Vian, Bracciano

2000 - 2004

Classical and ancient studies (Liceo Classico)
photo of me

Skills

    • Programming
    • Python/Flask
    • Go
    • Bash
      Automation
    • SaltStack
    • Ansible
    • Terraform
    • Puppet
      Web
    • Apache
    • Nginx
    • HAProxy
      DB
    • MySQL
    • PostgreSQL (basic)
    • Redis
    • Memcached
    • InfludDB (basic)
      Misc
    • BIND
    • PowerDNS
    • Apache Trafficserver (basic)
    • IPVS/Keepalived
    • Hashicorp suite
    • K8S/K3S (basic)
    • Graphite
    • Prometheus (basic)
    • Docker/LXC/LXD

Languages

  • Italian
    Native
  • English
    C1

Interests

  • Double bass playing
  • Field recording
  • Open Source
  • Hiking/Trekking

GPG

  • Key ID
    Fingerprint
  • 19061099
    1D49 4BBD 7F8F 6F03 73B6 D13C 027A 5D71 1906 1099