Steven Armstrong is a DevOps solution architect, a process automation specialist, and an honors graduate in Computer and Electronic Systems (BEng) from Strathclyde University in Glasgow. He has a proven track record of streamlining company's development architecture and processes so that they can deliver software at pace. Specializing in agile, continuous integration, infrastructure as code, networking as code, Continuous Delivery, and deployment, he has worked for 10 years for leading consulting, financial services, benefits and gambling companies in the IT sector to date. After graduating, Steven started his career at Accenture Technology solutions as part of the Development Control Services graduate scheme, where he worked for 4 years, then as a configuration management architect helping Accenture's clients automate their build and deployment processes for Siebel, SAP, WebSphere, Weblogic, and Oracle B2B applications. During his time at Accenture, he worked within the development control services group working for clients, such as the Norwegian Government, EDF Energy, Bord Gais, and SABMiller. The EDF Energy implementation led by Steven won awards for “best project industrialization” and “best use of Accenture shared services”. After leaving Accenture, Steven moved on to the financial services company, Cofunds, where he spent 2 years creating continuous integration and Continuous Delivery processes for .Net applications and Microsoft SQL databases to help deploy the financial services platform. After leaving Cofunds, Steven moved on to Thomsons Online Benefits, where he helped create a new DevOps function for the company. Steven also played an integral part in architecting a new private cloud solution to support Thomsons Online Benefits production applications and set up a Continuous Delivery process that allowed the Darwin benefits software to be deployed to the new private cloud platform within minutes. Steven currently works as the technical lead for Paddy Power Betfair's i2 project, where he has led a team to create a new greenfield private cloud platform for Paddy Power Betfair. The implementation is based on OpenStack and Nuage VSP for software-defined networking, and the platform was set up to support Continuous Delivery of all Paddy Power Betfair applications. The i2 project implementation was a finalist for the OpenStack Super User Award and won a RedHat Innovation Award for Modernization. Steven is an avid speaker at public events and has spoken at technology events across the world, such as DevSecCon London, OpenStack Meetup in Cluj, the OpenStack Summit in Austin, HP Discover London, and most recently gave a keynote at OpenStack Days Bristol.
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