About Sterling

About Sterling

Sterling Hammer

I have been in the industry for 20 years in a variety of different roles. I’m passionate about leveraging new technologies in new and exciting ways and continue to work to modernize the way companies manage Private and Public clouds, and of course the melding of both; Hybrid Cloud. I have worked in several different industries including K-12 Education, Real Estate and most recently a Managed Service Provider and Microsoft Azure. I have technical experience in Public and Private cloud Technologies as well as DevOps and Open Source, including Azure, Azure Stack, Azure DevOps, Hyper-V, Linux (Ubuntu, CentOS, RedHat) and Docker. I have a large focus on process and reliability, ensuring that teams and tools are enabled for success.

Microsoft

I am currently Senior Azure Reliability Engineer on the Azure CXP team at Microsoft based out of Washington. In this role I focus on Azure reliability and engage with individual customers to help them make their Azure deployments more resilient and ensure they’re taking advantage of the various services that are available to them. I have a large focus on internal tools, processes and compliance. I work to enable my team to deliver consistent engagements utilizing proven datasets and useful tooling.

You can learn a bit more about Azure CXP here.

Rackspace

As a Product Architect on the Microsoft Cloud team, my role was to shape the look and feel of the Microsoft Private Cloud at Rackspace including Hyper-V, Cloud Platform, and Azure Stack. In my role I was focused on Microsoft Cloud Technologies based on Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Azure Stack and Microsoft Virtualization.

I was involved with a variety of Microsoft programs including Azure Advisor and several TAP and Preview Programs.

During my time at Rackspace I served in a variety of different roles. As a Systems Engineer I helped manage several large hybrid server deployments with technologies such as Microsoft SQL Server and VMware. As a Product Architect, I assisted with the launch of two new Microsoft Product Offerings, Fanatical Support for Hyper-V and Cloud Platform as well as Fanatical Support for Microsoft Azure.

Certifications

I currently hold a variety of Azure and industry certifications, including but not limited to:

Azure DevOps Engineer Expert Azure Developer Associate Azure Administrator Associate

Projects

During my time at Rackspace I worked very closely with Andre Stephens and Co-Architected several mission critical applications.

Graviton

Graviton was developed fully in house utilizing Visual Studio and is a .NET MVC application. It is architected primarily in Azure using Web Apps, Cosmos DB, Key Vault, Hybrid Connections, monitored using Application Insights, and deployed via CI/CD and Azure DevOps. Features include Capacity Planning for Hyper-V which utilizes a PowerShell backend to gather metrics from Hyper-V servers and report them to end users. Graviton is also used for all implementation and deployment of Virtual Machines and Hosts to decrease build time and reduce human error. These processes use Azure Automation and Hybrid Workers where possible, PowerShell is leveraged to provide JSON returns allowing a fully automated end to end workflow.

Graviton Capacity Dashboard

Azure Monitoring

Co-Architected monitoring solution for Microsoft Azure support at Rackspace allowing the generation of trouble tickets in our internal systems from Operations Management Suite and Log Analytics.

As one of the world’s largest managed cloud providers, Rackspace hosts all kinds of workloads for thousands of organizations—from small businesses to global enterprises, including more than half of the Fortune 100. It serves customers on all the major cloud platforms, including its recent addition of Azure to its offerings.

Microsoft: Rackspace monitors a world of cloud performance data through a single pane of glass

If you’d like to reach out you can find me on a variety of social media platforms.

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