Emanuel Calvo

Bio(graffiti)

I am a multifaceted professional with excellent communication skills, a strong commitment to principles, and a passion for sharing knowledge and tools with others.

Currently, I am the Professional Services Technical Lead and Database Platform and Systems Engineering at OnGres, where I am a valued partner, helping customers to design and operate highly available and scalable databases.

In addition, as the founder of ViaDB, I specialize in consultancy and tool development, using a variety of programming languages including Go, Python, and Bash.

Commitment to my principles and values drives my work, and I collaborate with non-profit organizations such as Apolo Foundation and Oportunidades Foundation to develop and support their IT ecosystems.

Before transitioning to a career in IT, between 1998 and 2007, I served in the Argentina’s Federal Bureau of Prisons (Servicio Penitenciario Federal) as an officer, managing operational groups at institutions ranging from medium to high security.

For more details, please see the sections below.

Skillset

• A considerable experience on scalability, reliability, architecturing and maintaining large scaled Database systems, including but not limited to Postgres, MySQL, ClickHouse, and Elastic. Most of the systems are/were business-critical.
• CI/CD for deploying Production Cloud-based and bare-metal infrastructure using Terraform/Packer, Ansible, Kubernetes, etc.
• Consistent experience in almost every mayor Cloud provider. Azure certified, GCloud, and AWS.
• A skilled communicator, managing Customer accounts worlwide.
• Hard-problem solving, and with aveced dealing of complex Production incidents.

I design reliable, scalable and ready-for-production Database infrastructures for some top-noch companies, based on Open Source Technologies from the ground up. That is, from coding the provisioning and deploy, components integrated in a Continuous Deployment (with Canary support, eg), to highly tweaked environments for performance and complex setups.

Other things that I love to do:

• I’m an experienced hydroponics micro-grower; DWC and NFT are my favorites.
• I’m an amateur musician, mostly generic strings and techno jam. Drawing is also a hobby.
• Love reading, particularly around polithical, econocomics and social affairs. An active Libertarian working from his basement :)

Positions

Independent Consultant - Open Source Databases and Architecture

Remote.

• Postgres, MySQL, ClickHouse, Elastic. Extensive experience in production environments, mostly in Linux/Unix environments.
• Automated Cloud Infrastrucures.
• HA, Performance, Monitoring,Debugging.
• Development.

Ongres Inc. - Professional Services Tech Lead / Database Platform Engineer

Remote. New York/Madrid Since September 2017 as OnGres, previously working as Consultant in 8kdata

As the Professional Services Technical Lead and Database Platform and Systems Engineering at OnGres, I am currently designing innovative system architectures to implement in our customers’ production clusters. In addition, I develop system tools to ensure seamless operation and maximum efficiency.

Highlighted projects:

• BBM (Blackberry - Emtek - Google Cloud): Live migration from Oracle to full Patroni automated cluster, from a premise based environment to Google Cloud. PgBouncer-Consul-Postgres
• Conrad (Google Cloud Partner): Full implementation of Patroni HA using etcd as consensus cluster, Load Balancing through Google iLB with API configuration with Patroni, and PgBouncer.
• GitLab as part of the Database Reliability Team and Database Architecture design.
• Postmates: Patroni Mult-project Terraform implementation with a centralized DCS.
• Postgres vs MongoDB 10k U$S automated benchmark, IaaC (Hashicorp echosystem, AWS provider based).
• Google Cloud as Partner.
• ARM support and automation implementation.
• AWS’s Babelfish project, as a Developer Advocate for the Open Source version.
• Also provided trainings, and consultancy in a variety of customers such as Gitlab, American Express, Nutanix, BBM (Blackberry), Conrad Electronics, ARM, Microsoft, and Postmates.
• stcpay Architecture design and Technical Leader of the Database Project.

Technologies:

• Infra and CD/CI: HCL (Terraform, Packer), Ansible, Kubernetes, Docker.
• Databases: Postgres (and flavours), MySQL, Oracle (to migrate out wink, wink)
• Languages: Golang, Python, C, bash. Time to time I code in NodeJS.
• Main Cloud Providers: Google Cloud, AWS, etc.

Education

• ESBA - Developer Analyst
• Escuela Penintenciaria de la Nación (Juán José O’Connor) - 2000 - Criminal Sciences Degree

External publications

• July 2nd, 2013: AWS - Postgres in AWS PostgreSQL running over EC2 instances with EBS/PIOPS storage. Minimum architecture, tips and advises. Download AWS in Postgres from local

Certifications

• PostgreSQL 9.4 Associate Certification, EDB33986.
• PostgreSQL 11 Professional Certification
• Azure Data Engineer and Microsoft Certified Trainer.

Other certifications related to DataScience Specialization:

• Toolbox
• R programming
• Getting and Cleaning Data
• Exploratory Analysis
• Reproducible Research
• Statistical inference
• Regression Models
• Big Data, University of San Diego

Past Experience

ViaDB (under Plataform3 SL)

• Madrid, Spain
• Buenos Aires, Argentina
• December, 2021 - November 2023

ViaDB is an Open Source Database Support and System tools development indie-company. Closed due to relocation.

See more at ViaDB.

Percona - Senior Technical Services Engineer [main position]

Buenos Aires, Argentina August 2016 - September 2017

Full description of the role here.

At Percona, I worked as a Remote DBA position at Atlas team. The core techology was MySQL and MariaDB, for large scale infrastructures.

Deep understanding of the replication protocol, availability, and sharding.

Some highlighted customers: Hyperwallet, Fitbit, Lookout, Shipwire

8kData - Data External Advisor

Madrid, Spain January 2016 - September 2017

External technical advisor and consultant for Postgres and other related technologies.

UDE - Open Source Source Undergraduate Degree Associate Professor

La Plata, Argentina June 2016

Open Source Source Undergraduate Degree Associate Professor, PostgreSQL Database specialist.

Pythian - Technical Team Lead - ACTG (Advanced Consulting Team Group) Member

Ottawa, Canada January 2015 - June 2016

• Support to Pythian’s External Profile.
• Member of the Advanced Consulting Team Group (PostgreSQL).
• Other Technologies: MySQL/MariaDB, xtraDB, Galera, Docker, Ansible, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Vertica, Oracle.
• Part of the ACTG for PostgreSQL implementations, solutions and architecture.
• Lead Database Consultant at T73.

Some highlighted customers: Microsoft, Beats (Apple), Adobe Echosign, Fitbit, Sendgrid, Mozilla Foundation, Zendesk, SendGrid.

2ndQuadrant - PostgreSQL Consultant

Buenos Aires, Argentina February 2014 - January 2015

• PostgreSQL consultant, support and training.
• Testing new features, debugging and code review.

BlackBird IT (ex-PalominoDB) - Database Operations - Professional Services

Las Vegas, NV September 2011 - February 2014

• Primary DBA/Teach Lead of the PostgresXC databases.
• MySQL-and-forks/PostgreSQL-and-Forks administration over several customers.
• Considerable amount of experience running DDL/Query/Capacity/Server Reviews.
• Technical writer (site is under “pythian.com”): http://www.palominodb.com/category/postgres
• Backups, Replication, HA, Monitoring, Trending, Health Reviews, DDL Reviews, percona toolkits and several Postgres tools.
• Some other databases that I’m currently working with: MongoDB, Cassandra, Redis.
• AWS experience. EC2, RDS, S3, LB, EBS, Redshift, DynamoDB, AWS API.
• Open Stack Cloud experience.
• Extensive experience on server reviews, workload tracing and SQL rewriting and tuning.
• Scripting/development: Python, Perl , PL/pgsql and bash. In reverse order.

Some of the highlighted customers: Adobe Echosign, Fitbit, Zendesk, Chegg, SendGrid

Aedgency - MySQL/Oracle Database Administrator

Barcelona, Spain November 2010 - March 2012

• MySQL/Oracle database administration.
• Query tuning and performance.
• ETL integration between databases.
• PL/SQL development.
• Bash scripting.
• Sphinx basic configuration, fixing and monitoring.

SIU - DBA & Database Production Consulting

Buenos Aires, Argentina July 2009 - July 2010

• Provided traning and support to national universities (as UNLP, UNC, UNNE, UNNOBA, UNCU, UNPA, UNR, etc), support developers in DB modeling and administration of Postgresql-Informix-Mysql databases.
• Data Architect tasks and server revisions. Planning migrations and future strategies to board new releases.
• Coordinated teams for database support to enhance the compliant between apps of SIU.
• Developing the production and pre-prod following plan for all the SIU apps. Server metrics and other stuff for high performance servers.

Globant - Unix/Linux Systems Administrator - EA

Buenos Aires, Argentina February 2009 - July 2009

• SysAdmin Unix at EA (Electronic Arts) Hydra - GOP project.
• Maintained platform consisted in Oracle database 10, Apaches and Tomcats (VAP, VCM) Clustered, with several stages of deploy.
• Main tasks were relate to deploys, environment configuration, VMWare Infraestructure Client maintenance and monitoring.
• I did Mysql DBA tasks on Prod, Pre-Production and Development Servers for a Forums project. Fixing some character set problems and DDL, backups, restores, check, performance and others.
• Basic knowledge on deployment / process with Maven - Ant - Hudson.
• Assigned 50% to another project to provide Engineering Support at EA over Python scripting.

Correo Argentino - Senior Systems Administrator

Monte Grande, Argentina August 2008 - February 2009

• Managed production platform at Correo Argentino (over 400 terms with local Postgres databases and Linux enviroment).
• Some machines was enlaced with a Active Directory throw WinBind.
• Created an improved deploy tool for scripts, database recovery, control and monitoring, etc.
• Also managed servers over Centos 5 for the support area’s knowledge-base application (7 DB MySQL 5.1)

Siemens - PHP developer

Monte Grande, Argentina January - August 2008

Admitel Platform developer. Consists in PHP + (Javascript, Ajax, x/Html, xml) - Oracle 8i. Some of the ’extra’ task was made some Perl scripts for support area.

Huenei - Application Support

Monte Grande , Argentina October 2007 - January 2008

• Terminal administration in W/NT and 2K remote servers. Configuration, control, monitoring. Attend Remedy tickets for fix problems and others.
• The application was in Paradox and Oracle databases, in which my tasks consisted in repair tables, fix some wrong data and others.
• Bug reporting and detection.
• MOSAIC debugging and support.
• Customer Correo Argentino / Siemens.