ARK crew just got a new family member. Meet Adrian Kerchev, our newest network architect that is going to provide a helping hand to our current lead network architect, Velislav.

Adrian is a networking expert from Bulgaria with tremendous knowledge ranging from simple network administration to building and managing large-scale networking solutions. He’s been in this industry for 18+ years (has worked for dozens of companies, including 2 ISPs) and has 5+ years background experience in virtualization (OpenVZ/XenServer/VMWare), containerization (Docker/RKT), continuous integration, configuration management, micro-services orchestration, and deployment automation from working in various software companies.

Here are some of his specialties and work he’s done in the past for different companies and clients:

Dynamic routing (BGP/OSPF): Quagga, Zebra (Linux) with 7 up-link providers.

Installation, configuration and administration of various networking servers based on Linux/Unix OS (Debian, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Mikrotik).

Building virtual machines with different guest operating systems based on OpenVZ virtual environment.

Scheduled local (with custom shell scripts) and centralized backup (with automated SFTP transfers) for linux servers.

Manage infrastructure operations and servers across multiple data centers with different geolocations.

Install, configure and administer multiple servers based on Citrix XenServer.

Deploy Test, Staging and Production Kubernetes clusters (CoreOS with RKT (Rocket) or Docker runtime).

Automated micro-services deployment on test, stage and production environments (Jenkins, Git, Maven, Docker, Kubernetes, Apache Kafka + Zookeeper, custom scripting)

Deploy Zookeeper cluster as well as multiple Kafka nodes — configure Kafka replication using uReplicator.

Deploy OpenStack on top of XenServer using native XenAPI capabilities.

Provide automated Xen VM Guest OS (CentOS, Ubuntu) and software (Web Server /Apache/Nginx, Jenkins, Ant, Git, Maven, Oracle Java, PostgreSQL) provisioning using Foreman and Puppet.

Configure various automated Continuous Integration Server (Jenkins) jobs for test department (scheduled jobs running automated tests on a separate VMs running a slave Jenkins server + GUI using Selenium Grid) and development department (scheduled Jenkins builds using Git, Maven, Ant, QT, GCC, Java).

Deploy PostgreSQL cluster by using built in streaming replication, UCARP and custom scripts in order to automate Master/Slave failover as well as Master/Master(BDR).

Utilize firewalls and routers (pfSense, Mikrotik) in order to provide an adequate security, load balance and connection failover (multiple WANs) as well as to create a company wide (Data Centers and Offices) VPN connectivity (IPsec, OpenVPN).

Ensure 24/7 services operations by network monitoring and alerting (OpenNMS, NetXMS + Kannel/SMS) as well as Data Center and server redundancy/failover by utilizing scheduled backups (custom shell scripts), GlusterFS Geo-replication and automated DNS records update (using API provided by Cloudflare and Linode).

Install, configure and maintain Apache James Mail server, Zimbra Collaboration Server and OpenFire server.

Daily system monitoring, verifying the integrity and availability of all hardware, server resources, reviewing system logs.

System redundancy (RAID1 and RAID5), full and incremental backup.

Setting up (compiling and configuring) different services such as: web server (Apache + PHP, Perl, SSL, MySQL auth), mail server (Sendmail, Exim, Qmail, Postfix including virus and spam protection), file server (Samba), web content filtering (DansGuardian) + proxy server (Squid), pop3/pop3s server (Popa3d, Qpopper, Dovecot), imap/imaps server (Courier, Dovecot), dns server (Bind), irc server (Hybrid 7), icq server (IServerd), sql server (MySQL, Postgresql, Interbase, MSSQL).

Patching, configuring and compiling (optimizing) Linux and BSD kernels.

Setting up firewalls with kernel and OS dependent tools such as: ipfwadm, ipchains, iptables, ipf, pf.

VPN and tunnel configuring: ipip, ip-gre, pptp, pppoe, vtun, openvpn, ipsec, eoip (mikrotik specific).

Basic HTML development, shell scripting (Bash) and CGI scripting (Perl), developing web management system (PHP).

Building, maintaining and monitoring (Nagios, Ipswitch What’s UP) LAN, and Wireless (802.11a/b/g) networks.

Advanced routing and QoS: iproute, cbq, htb.

Installing and configuring small software VoIP system (Trixbox — based on CentOS and Asterisk PBX)

Adrian’s expertise and insight will be an invaluable tool for our ongoing efforts in keeping up with top tier networking practices and baselines while also keeping ARK servers and nodes running efficiently by providing critical troubleshooting skills. We are very pleased to welcome Adrian to the ARK family!