Highly experienced and Azure certified Microsoft MVP/MCT with strong experience in architecting Microsoft Azure solutions including migrations, hybrid cloud and cloud native workloads.
Azure Technical Specialist
Passionate for sharing knowledge and technical experiences in the Azure community with an active social following on Twitter/LinkedIn and runs a widespread Azure blog website which has been viewed over 280,000 times.
- Blog: www.thomasthornton.cloud
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/tamstar1234
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomas-thornton-21a86b75
- Speaking & Events: https://thomasthornton.cloud/speaking-events/
- Blog Features: https://thomasthornton.cloud/blog-features/
- GitHub: https://github.com/thomast1906
Gained the following Microsoft Azure certifications:
- Azure Solutions Architect
- DevOps Engineer
- Network Engineer
- Azure Security Engineer
- Azure Administrator
Skills & Abilities
- Proficient in motivating the development of customers workloads into Azure and increasing their utilisation of the platform by providing deployment guidance, supporting development of the customers cloud adoption model and providing appropriate recommendations to overcome blockers
- Provide Azure technical expertise including strategic design and architectural mentorship, assessments, POCs, etc., in support of the overall sales lifecycle and consulting engagement
- Evaluating current cloud environments and propose additional technologies and solutions to gain more benefit of cloud technologies and utilising further Azure resources.
- Non-functional requirements considered throughout any designs and solutions created whiling using and referencing the Microsoft adoption frameworks including well-architected framework, cloud adoption framework and enterprise scale landing zones
- Hands-on experience in Azure Migrations, hybrid cloud and cloud native workloads including backup and disaster recovery strategies
- Resourceful in delivering System/Applications maintenance support and responding to outages during off-hour software deployments within established Service Level Agreements (SLAs).
- Networking design and configuration for various cloud workloads including hub/spoke implementations and site-to-site connectivity
- Extensive experience in writing automated pipelines (CI/CD) and Infrastructure as code (IaC)
- Taking customers through DevOps journeys and implementing DevOps cultures into teams
- Participation in knowledge sharing activities, both within teams and wider non-technical audiences
- Develop and implement monitoring, backup and archival solutions in Azure to support customer requirements
- Troubleshoot and identify performance, connectivity and other issues for the applications hosted in Azure platform
Experience
Kainos, Belfast – Azure Technical Specialist
(November 2020 to Present)
As an Azure Technical Specialist in Kainos, responsible for leading teams and developing high quality solutions which delight Kainos clients.
- Leading agile cross-functional teams in design, architecture, and deployment of solutions in Azure including migrations, cloud-native solutions and hybrid environments both Windows and Linux
- Cloud and environment optimisation with ownership of technical delivery, customer engagements and sales enablement
- Create and maintain project related documentation (Statement of Work Document, Proof of concept document, technical design document (high-level and low-level design) etc.)
- Helping customers to design, automate, build, and support modern digital service platforms,
- Implement infrastructure and application monitoring solutions using both Azure native monitoring solutions and third-party
- Meeting with clients to understand their needs and cloud requirements; leading architect assessment meetings and determining gaps between those and technical functionality, throughout collaborating with all various stakeholders to generate mutually agreeable and strategic solutions.
- Strong verbal and written communications skills, with the ability to communicate technical design simply and clearly in conversation, documentation, and presentation to a technical and non-technical audiences
- Deploy Infrastructure in Terraform, ARM templates, Bicep, Azure CLI, PowerShell/Bash; including deployments of IaC at scale by creating modularisation templates using deployment tools including Azure DevOps and GitHub Actions
- Effective decision making within fast-moving delivery and support environments
- Creating and providing Azure training workshops, documentation, and labs for clients and internal Kainos teams including training on new Azure services and features
- Migration Project reviews and guide team on technical and functional perspective.
- Identifying and analysing applications for cloud assessment and fitment; mapping these workloads across IaaS, PaaS and private clouds
- Analyse and create costings for Azure implementations
- Engaging with customers to understand their evolving business needs to align cloud strategy on priorities
- Communication with client-side technical team on architecture point of view and signoff.
- Ensuring enterprise-wide needs for due diligence, risk assessment and continuing vendor monitoring are being accomplished.
- Design and create Azure cloud controls, governance, and Azure Security; creating blueprints to reflect these
- Strong verbal and written communications skills, with the ability to communicate technical design simply and clearly in conversation, documentation, and presentation to a technical and non-technical audience.
- Passionate about developing people with demonstrated ability in managing, coaching, and developing junior members of your team and wider community.
- Supporting the development growth of Kainos’ cloud services practice
Kainos, Belfast – Senior Platform Engineer
(January 2017 – November 2020)
- Provide Azure technical expertise including strategic design and architectural changes, assets, POC’s
- Assist in architecting solutions using Azure IaaS services including compute, networking, monitoring, security, backup recovery etc
- Building cloud architecture in Microsoft Azure in Agile working practices using Azure DevOps
- Azure architecture build using ARM templates(JSON), Terraform and PowerShell
- Creating Azure DevOps Pipelines via code (YAML)
- Continuously develop numerous Azure PowerShell/Azure CLI scripts and configurations to assist deploys in Azure
- Develop and maintain numerous technical knowledge-based articles for team
- Provide technical oversight and guidance during client engagements
- Contributing to technical decisions and direction in an agile team environment, including architecture, estimation, product planning and user story/requirement creation
- Participate in internal and customer meetings assisting with the ongoing advancement of technology offerings
- Provides technical expertise to colleagues within Azure
- Proven track record of completing straight forward to complex implementations in delivery & support projects
- Troubleshoot and identify performance, connectivity and other issues for the infrastructure hosted in Azure
- Up skills & mentors junior members of the team, providing “go-to” assistance when required.
- Can clearly communicate technical design in conversation, documentation and presentation to a technical audience.
- Participation in knowledge sharing activities, both within the team and with wider non-technical audiences
- Superb interpersonal skills, that works in a meticulous manner with a professional attitude and firm personality to see tough jobs through independently or as a team member
Kainos, Belfast – Platform Engineer
(April 2015 – January 2017)
- Working primarily in Azure and UKCloud platforms
- Excellent technical skills, with strong knowledge of current and emerging technologies that expresses an interest in enhancing his current skill set while learning new ones.
- Working in fast-paced, deadline-oriented environments
- Implementation & delivery of projects with minimal supervision where self-sufficiency and creating thinking are required
- Solid background of providing support to customers both in services and government sectors
- Proven track record of completing straight forward to complex implementations in delivery & support projects
- Observant throughout while overcoming potential barriers ensuring deadlines are met.
- Regularly prioritising demanding workload
- Follows ITIL processes throughout delivery and support
Thomas Thornton 