Sacha Wharton

Senior DevOps Engineer

at i1 Solutions

I am a Cape Town-based Senior DevOps Engineer. I specialise in containerising clients’ monolithic applications (Angular / NodeJS, Spring Boot front- and backends, Python and PostgreSQL, MySQL and Oracle databases) with Kubernetes and Helm, converting them to microservices architecture using the GitOps model on the AWS platform. My role also includes proof of concept, assessing and advising on application design and database architecture, diagramming new proposed architectures, cloud migration, and using Terraform to deploy cloud services. Upon successful migration, I am responsible for training and supporting application teams whilst they transition to the GitOps mode of working. I am passionate about future developments in GitOps and believe the next shift will be towards event-driven architectures using tools such as Keptn. At Ortelius, the open-source microservices project I contribute to, we built a platform-agnostic event-driven architecture and I diagrammed this complex process. Ortelius has given me the opportunity to both collaborate with pioneers in this field and serve the next generation through mentoring. I am on the Ortelius Governing board and Technical Oversight Committee, my primary focus is on Architecture. At Ortelius, I have created a local development environment to speed up the onboarding of both seasoned and early career developers. I am also involved in integrating Backstage into the ecosystem to remove the operational pain points for developers. I have many years of infrastructure engineering experience and am comfortable working at enterprise level in highly regulated industries such as FinTech. At Kurtosys, our clients included prominent multinational asset managers and financial institutions. As an example, I project managed and orchestrated our disaster recovery plan on Azure with multiple teams across the globe, acquiring valuable documentation and communication skills. I am passionate about harnessing and leveraging disruptive technologies to drive innovation and cloud native environments: it requires a breaking down of siloed work cultures, a wide skill set, constant learning and keeping abreast of new technologies, and keeps you humble as you navigate intriguing and ever-changing arenas. I am an out-of-the-box thinker who likes to discover creative ways of achieving results through technology, a voracious learner, thrive under pressure, and excellent at lifting the spirits of the people I work with.