Talking tech: This 20-year dev vet weighs in on working at AlienVault

by Kelly O'Halloran
July 19, 2017

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Before joining the AlienVault engineering team in October 2015, Ernest Mueller held DevOps gigs at Copperegg, Bazaarvoice, National Instruments and FedEx. AlienVault develops commercial and open-source cybersecurity solutions. Today, Mueller serves as their lean systems manager, offering 20 years of technical experience supporting small and large teams. We caught up with Mueller to learn a bit more about his role and how he ended up at the company.

ernest linkedin alienvault.jpgWhat exactly does it mean to be AlienVault’s Lean Systems Manager?

I joined AlienVault to be part of our SaaS implementation for USM Anywhere. I’m the “Lean Systems Manager” in engineering, which means operations work with an eye for optimizing our software delivery pipeline and infrastructure toolchain for maximum delivery of value.

 

What first attracted you to AlienVault?

The first thing that attracted me was the idea of bringing more powerful security solutions to the “little guy.” I’ve been involved in security work before, and if you don’t have a million dollar budget you can get virus scanning and a kick in the pants.

Then when I came to interview I realized that Lee Thompson, one of the OGs of the DevOps community who I had met out at conventions and such, was one of the leaders here, and that closed me.

You’ve been doing this for 20 years. What's different about working on this engineering team compared to others?

We deliver super fast. In June 2016, our leadership said, “We should deliver our product as a SaaS offering,” and we went live with a MVP in October. We’ve very focused on pervasive automation, continuous integration, and using new technology to make things happen.

Also, it’s just a great bunch of folks.

What technology stacks do you work with?

I’ve worked on both the Open Threat Exchange product (OTX), which is a full continuous delivery microservice-based architecture based on Python/Mongo/MySql/Docker/AWS ECS etc, and the USM Anywhere product, which is Java/Postgres/Elasticsearch/AWS EC2 etc.

We use the Atlassian stack (Bitbucket/Bamboo/Jira/Confluence /Hipchat) for continuous build and collaboration. There’s Maven, Puppet, CloudFormation, Terraform, and Consul as part of our systems architecture.

What are you currently working on?

I’m working on migrating the rest of OTX into the continuous delivery, 100 percent-automated structure we’ve put in place. This allows individual pieces of our stack to get checked in, automatically tested, and roll to production in minutes. It also allows for all of the parts of our infrastructure to be checked in, tested, and instantiated through our build system.

How has the team recently collaborated?

We were moving our MongoDB databases to be hosted with Mongo, and myself and one of the OTX developers rapid cycled to quickly fix both security and reliability issues that emerged during that integration. We located the issues, discussed and decided whether the fix should be in the Python code or on the infrastructure side, pushed a new build, tested, and repeated several times a day.  

With everyone focused on the same end goals, “doing the right thing” — and quickly — became a reality!

How do y'all celebrate team wins?

We have larger team builder type celebrations. For example, we took off the day before the Fourth of July weekend and went out to Zilker Park. We’ve also had our engineering kickoff meeting at Top Golf.  

But even better, we try to celebrate our successes daily. The teams are pretty tight knit and go out to lunch together frequently where we congratulate each other and help brainstorm solutions to issues informally.

What does it take for someone to be a good fit on your team?

As the Austin engineering team is fairly new we need some “fit” but we also need some additional diversity of experience and strengths. The common factors that make someone fit regardless of their specific interests, life situation, etc. are: a self starter with a passion for learning new technologies and building/fixing things the right way; ability to move quickly and be flexible in the face of change; ability to put politics and personality aside; evaluate the pros and cons of approaches — and then enthusiastically support the direction the team decides on.

We’re not an environment where you’re going to be spoon fed what to do and given extensive requirements and a completely groomed backlog. To fit here, you just have to be someone who can take initiative and be aware of the bigger picture so that you know the right thing to be doing.

 

 

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