My name is Thomas Karmann and I am a systems engineer, currently living in Berlin, Germany.
In the early 2000s I started to get involved with Linux and after school I studied computer science at FAU, majoring in operating systems, computer architecture and virtualization, while working as a system administrator for the CS department. After graduating I started working in the IT industry doing:
- 🧯 IT Operations and Site Reliability Engineering
- ⚙️ Systems engineering for Linux and UNIX datacenter environments
- ☁️ Cloud engineering for AWS environments
I currently work for @idealo on observability topics.
My skillset covers multiple domains:
-
Platform Engineering and Infrastructure as Code
- Fluid in all major configuration systems and IaC ecosystems like CFEngine, Ansible, Puppet, Terraform, HCL, AWS CDK, Helm, kustomize, boto
- From building IaC libraries and templates to fully managed platforms
- Kubernetes (bare-metal, Rancher, EKS) architecture, configuration and optimization, building integrations
- Code and Deployment Pipelines using GitLab, GitHub, Jenkins
- Testing and validating infrastructure components using assertions, snapshot- and integration tests with AWS CDK and terratest
-
Observability Engineering (Monitoring, Logging, Alerting)
- Prometheus, Prometheus Federations, VictoriaMetrics and Grafana for scraping, aggregating, storing and visualizing large amounts of system and application metrics in distributed systems
- Logstash, Vector and Elasticsearch/Opensearch for collecting, aggregating, storing, querying and visualizing large amounts of system- and application logs in distributed systems
- Nagios, Icinga, Munin for legacy environments
-
Softwaredevelopment using C/C++, Python, Java and Typescript
- For ISPs building large-scale provisioning flows for CPEs and routers using CWMP/TR-69 and SSH/netmiko
- For IXPs building monitoring components like prometheus exporters
- For Webshops using Zope, Flask, FastAPI, Nodejs, Typescript
If I touch computers in my free time I am busy with:
- Creating and recording music using DAWs, instruments and controllers (soundcloud)
- Learning to build DSP and audio software, plugins
- DIY projects, home automation, microcontrollers