Intro

My name is Manohar and I live in Melbourne, Australia.


I have a total of 12 years of IT experience in the investment banking and tolling industry domains including 6 years in application support role and 6 years in automation testing. CCNA and AWS certified with strong analytical and problem solving skills. Experience in automation, build and release deployments, incident management, and problem management.

Work Experience

Aug 2021 - Current
Application Support Analyst
Work location: Melbourne, Australia

  • Maintenance and support of tolling systems and services.
  • Upliftment of the existing automation and monitoring scripts using Python and SoapUI.
  • Maintenance of Splunk dashboards for application monitoring and alerting.
  • Knowledge of multiple AWS services - S3, EC2, VPC, Lambda, Cloudwatch, Access Controls, RDS, API Gateway. Also supported the application team during release deployment.
  • Experience on Datadog in monitoring and alerting applications and troubleshooting.
  • Knowledge of Jenkins to build pipelines and deployment.
  • Windows patching activities and technical verification post patching on production servers.
  • Worked with the cybersecurity team in analysing and fixing vulnerabilities within applications.
Key Contributions/Achievements
  • Enhancement to the existing roadside file transfer process using SoapUI/Groovy and enhancement to the Splunk dashboard for business users.

    • Aug 2016 - Aug 2021
    Systems Analyst
    Work location: Sydney & Melbourne, Australia

    • Maintenance and support of critical and high-availability trading system.
    • Proactive monitoring of the applications throughout business hours using tools like New Relic and Splunk.
    • Troubleshooting and resolving of critical issues with respect to the application, servers, databases or networks.
    • Problem investigation to find root cause of the applicable incidents.
    • Coordination between multiple teams including internal and vendor technical support team.
    • Installation of certificates and proper maintenance of the knowledge articles.
    • Windows patching activities and technical verification post patching on production servers.
    • Disaster recovery test coordination, walkthrough and execution playing the role of Recovery team lead.
    • Prioritisation and distribution of incidents and BAU requests in queue keeping in mind the business impact and priority.
    • Review and analysis of new project documents, source code, implementation plan, and disaster recovery plan for any production change as part of Change Management Process.
    • Support of vendor provided applications and databases by coordinating with the respective teams following ITSM protocols and maintaining SLAs
    • Decommissioning of applications, websites, servers and vendor products from data centre post project transitioning.
    Key Contributions/Achievements
    • Have played the role of incident recovery manager in multiple high priority incidents.
    • Have fixed a high severity incident related to market data by enhancing the application logic which was not reproducible in non-production environment.
    • Have fixed an ongoing overdraft issue saving the business from heavy financial loss.

    Oct 2015 – Jul 2016
    Test Analyst
    Work location: Sydney, Australia

    • Automated the manual test cases using HP ALM and Selenium.
    • Creation of automation regression suite for the Rebranding project.
    • Requirement analysis of different modules based on project.
    • Preparation of test plan, test strategy and test conditions.
    • Defect tracking and maintenance.
    • Analysis on test automation scope, feasibility, resourcing, planning
    • Coordination between the business groups, technology groups and offshore team.
    • Status reporting to various stakeholders.
    • Preparation of automation test plan.
    • Test automation training for the new team members.
    Key Contributions/Achievements
    • Have transformed an existing functional testing team into an automation team.
    • Implemented a development driven testing to automate some trickier modules in an online application.

    Apr 2013 – Sep 2015
    Test Analyst
    Work location: Bangalore, India

    • Automation testing using QTP – Keyword driven framework
    • Update to the existing automation scripts – Website and various desktop applications.
    • Created automation suite for Terminal application (Putty) using HP QTP
    • Support for the functional testing team by providing automated test scripts
    • Regression Testing
    • Preparation of automation test plan
    • Automation framework design and development for the Online Application webpage
    • Regression testing of the Production website using selenium
    • Version controlling of the test suites, test scripts etc. using SVN
    Key Contributions/Achievements
    • Automated entire online application webpage using QTP.

    Oct 2010 – Mar 2013
    Test Analyst
    Work location: Bangalore, India

    • Functional testing in UNIX platform
    • Automation testing using QTP – Data driven framework.
    • Health checks of all the test and development environments
    • Regression Testing
    • Pre-Regression and Post-Regression validations using Perl/Shell scripts
    • Runsheet (Test Case) preparation
    • Data setup for accounts and securities and performing trades and transactions as per BAU work requests
    • Writing Perl/Shell scripts to automate test executions, validations and to automate other manual validations
    • Version controlling of the test suites, test scripts, runsheets etc. using Clearcase
    Key Contributions/Achievements
    • Reduced the environment health check time to half from 1 hour to half an hour by modifying the existing scripts.
    • Reduced the report validation time from 2 hours to 0.5 hours by automating using Perl script.
    • Designed and developed a test automation framework using Perl for report processing team.

Personal Projects

1. Story of my Portfolio website - $35 to 55cents
I started out on this portfolio website when I was studying for AWS associate level certifications in 2018. Personal portfolio is a great way to present oneself as a professional and there are so many platforms out there which can be used to build one within minutes without much of hassle. But I thought to build the website myself in AWS. I started out with the very basic idea of doing it using WordPress.
So I opted for an AMI (WordPress certified by Bitnami and Automattic) with the rate of $0.012/hr at the time; built a VPC, subnet, IGW; spun up EC2 instance; set up routing and added Security policies. I spent bit of time creating the website in Wordpress as I had almost forgotten everything since college..
The website turned out to be pretty good and just to give a shout out to Bitnami that their documentation is really good and quite exhaustive. It definitely helped me a lot with the initial configuration and setup. Below is a high level diagram of the website at the time.

After couple of months, I realised that it was quite expensive for me to spend $30-$35 every month to run that website which can be done quite easily using a S3 bucket and Cloudfront. So I went Serverless this time and terminated the EC2 instance and got rid of the VPC. Below diagram shows how efficiently that website was transformed. And to my surprise, I have been paying only 55-60 cents every month since then.
!! Yay !!

2. Story of my networking journey
I would like to start with the below photo
I always try to get my basics clear before starting any project. So when I thought of diving into the CyberSecurity world, the first thing that came to my mind was networking. I have prior experience in Perl scripting and a fair knowledge of Windows and Linux operating systems working in test automation and application support role. But networking was something that I was not really confident on. So I set my target for CCNA - Routing & Switching to get a solid foundation in networking. After going through many videos in multiple Youtube channels, finally I came across CBTNuggets and I was really surprised by its contents. I subscribed its membership and started my networking journey. I decided to take the path of ICND1 and then ICND2 to become a CCNA. Going through all the videos and then labbing those up in Packet Tracer first; then gradually moving to GNS3. It was really interested and kept me busy which I liked. After a month, it occured to me that I was missing something and needed to practice on real equipments atleast for the ICND1. So I purchased some items on ebay and started playing around which was really fun. ICND2 labs were mostly done using GNS3. At last I passed both the exams in Sept-2019. And with this experience I can now start diving into the Cyber Security space. I know it will be a very long a diffcult journey without the organisational level hands-on experice in the networking space. But I am determined stay focussed and will reach my goal !!

3. Story continues : DevOps journey continues ....
So.. after passing the CCNA exam and working on various projects at work on AWS, I am continuing the journey into DevOps. Initially started with Terraform and deep diving into CI/CD space, learning Kubernetes as well. There are so many great and helping people out there in the online community that it really feels confident to start - youtube videos and paid online courses on multiple platforms. I have my high level preparation planned out diving deep into DevOps. Also, I have been working on my blog site fully utilising all the CI/CD learnings so far to consolidate and document my work and progress in this area which will be live soon.

Journey continues ...