About Me
Hi, my name is Marco Blessing and I live in the south of Germany near a city called Karlsruhe.
Projects #
Take a look at my self hosted Gitea instance to get an overview of my current work.
Favorite Topics #
I’m very interested in PowerShell, NodeJS, Go and Software Engineering in general.
Additionally I love building CI/CD Stacks with different open-source products to spread the word of DevOps and Containerization.
Skills #
Here comes a list of subjects I’ve worked with, grouped by topics…
Container and Docker related #
Traefik • Portainer • Docker Swarm Mode • Sonatype Nexus Repository • Aqua Security Trivy • Prometheus • Node-Exporter • cAdvisor • Alertmanager • Karma
Scripting and Programming Languages #
PowerShell • JavaScript • Go • Python • PHP • Object Pascal • C++ • Visual Basic
Operating Systems #
Microsoft Windows 98SE++ • Microsoft Windows Server 2000++ • CentOS (and other Red Hat Enterprise Linux derivatives) • SLES • ubuntu
Cloud Orchestration and Automation #
Microsoft Azure • eCloud Manager • FLOWSTER Studio • Citrix Cloud Platform • Citrix Cloud Platform Business Manager
Server Roles, Features and Products #
Active Directory • File Server • Web Server (IIS and Apache) • DBs (MSSQL, MySQL, PostgresSQL, Oracle 10g) • Backup & Restore (IBM Tivoli Storage Manager) • Server Hypervisor (VMWare ESX, HyperV) • Terminal Server (Microsoft, Citrix XenApp/ XenDesktop) • Software Virtualization (VMware ThinApp) • Software Packaging and Deployment (Enteo Netinstall, Matrix42) • Monitoring (Zabbix) • Build Engines (Jenkins, AppVeyor)
General Software, Frameworks #
Node.js • Gitea • Drone.io • WoodpeckerCI • Vue.js • Quasar • tailwindcss • HAproxy • Keepalive • git SCM • Phabricator • VSCode
Experience #
2018 - 202 Komm.ONE as SysOp / DevOps Engineer #
2022 Cloud-Platform Infrastructure Project
Komm.ONE decided to create a complete new Cloud-Platform Infrastructure. The project started several years ago and replaced all software and hardware. Now it was our turn - So we started planning and implementing our test stage in the new environment. 2023 will challenge us to review and adapt the automation stack to changing requirements…
2021 New Full Stack Self Service Portal
In 2021 I wanted to get back into coding and software architecture. So I started refactoring our Self Service Portal. The requirements have changed so much in the meantime that we decided to start from scratch. So we started a new full stack project containing these key elements:
| Tier | Components |
|---|---|
| Backend | Go + Node.js |
| Frontend | Vue.js 3 (with Pinia, Vue Router) & Quasar |
| Data Management | CouchDB, MongoDB, SQL |
2020 Cloud-Frontend Automation Stack
The year 2020 started with designing a new Automation Stack. My main goal war to upgrade the tech stack while keeping the required operating an maintenance as low as possible. So I replaced some products to split the features / responsibilities:
| Role | Replaced Product | New Component |
|---|---|---|
| Operational Platform | native Apps | Container based with Docker, traefik, Portainer |
| Git VCS | Phabricator | Gitea |
| Artifact Store | Jenkins | Nexus Repository Manager OSS |
| Build Server | Jenkins | Drone.io |
| Wiki + KB | Phabricator | Outline |
| Landing Page | Phabricator | Ghost CMS |
| Event Monitoring + Alerting | - | Prometheus, Alertmanager, cAdvisor, Karma, Grafana |
| Service Status | - | Uptime Kuma |
| Web Analytics | matomo | Umami |
| Static Websites | Jenkins | Hugo |
2019 Internal Self Service Portal
I spent the second half of the year creating a single-page application based on Vue.js for visualizing product changelog and configuration details. Therefore I had to relearn javaScript and started working with the materialize-css framework and other well known node modules.
2019 Release Management Tool MkII
First part of the year I was focused on expanding the Release Management tools and workflows for our cloud hosted applications:
- Added automated aggregation of release details for each hosted application.
- Added changelog workflow for documenting releases.
- Defined rollout life cycle states for each new release.
- ITIL compliant syncing of the release data into centralized CMDB.
2018 KIVBF merged with its partners to form Komm.ONE in order to be able to offer uniform services. After adjusting the internal organizational structure, I’m now part of the business unit 4.2 (Integration-, Security- & Application Management). My previous team was reassigned to this new unit as well, and was renamed into CAFS (Cloud- & Application-Frontend-Services). So my range of tasks changed slightly.
2012 - 2018 KIVBF as SysOp / DevOps Engineer #
2015 In 2015 I started automating several platform and workload related use cases. Unfortunately it’s closed source, so I can’t talk about details. But to give a glimpse at the underlining technologies I can notice they were based on Microsoft, VMware and Citrix products.
2014 As the automation team got bigger and bigger, we needed to define standards. That’s why I began using Phabricator as a developer framework in combination with Jenkins to build our modules. This enabled us doing code review, lint tests,unit test and building our own CI Environment.
2013 I joined into a new team which was building our new cloud infrastructure. We purposed to offer our customers IaaS, PaaS, SaaS and EaaS services. My focus shifted to automation and cloud orchestration. Back then I started using Powershell.
2012 I needed to get away from those wacky enterprise applications which were used in the public sector. So I took the chance to work in much bigger datacenter at KIVBF. There I ran the backup and restore solution called IBM Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM).
It was a great place to get to know such large environment and I finally started automating again. At this time I implemented the monitoring system Zabbix. Unfortunately I couldn’t find any extension to monitor out IBM tape library or TSM data itself. So I developed own interfaces therefore.
2008 - 2012 Pforzheim municipal administration as SysOp #
At the municipal administration of Pforzheim I was responsible for the Software Packaging and Deployment, MS-SQL Servers and Web Hosting.
Education #
I successfully finished two undergraduate trainings as IT Specialist For Application Development and Management Assistant in IT-Systems.