Dagmawi Biru

Dagmawi (Dag) Biru is a cloud support engineer at Canonical, based in the Dallas–Fort Worth area. This is my personal site.

About

I work on Linux, OpenStack, KVM, libvirt and the rest of the virtualization stack, helping customers keep their private clouds running. Before that I spent a few years on the physical side of things in a hyperscale data center, and before that, on software-defined networking and web development.

I like understanding a system all the way down, from the rack and the cabling up to the API. Most of what I know I learned by breaking it at home first.

Work

Cloud Support Engineer – present
Canonical, remote. Support for Ubuntu-based private clouds: OpenStack, Kubernetes, Linux, KVM and libvirt.
Data Center Operations Engineer –
Facebook, Dallas–Fort Worth. On-site engineer maintaining server fleet capacity. Hands-on with Open Compute Project hardware and day-to-day data center work at scale.
Solution Support Engineer, SP Cloud –
Cisco, Richardson. Supported service-provider cloud products including Network Services Orchestrator (NSO), NFV Infrastructure Software (NFVIS) and Virtual Infrastructure Manager.
Web Developer
RobbinsKersten Direct, Richardson. PHP development on front-end and back-end web applications.
Junior Web Developer –
Vertical Nerve, Dallas. Drupal sites and custom modules.

Projects

Most of my code lives on GitHub as dwbfox. A few I still point people to:

  • go-stock-ticker. A small command-line tool for checking stock quotes, written in Go.
  • znc2mysql. A module for the ZNC IRC bouncer that logs incoming messages to MySQL. Python 3.
  • Delete All Taxonomies. A Drupal module that clears out every taxonomy term in one step instead of one at a time.

Home lab

At home I run a small Kubernetes cluster on Supermicro and Raspberry Pi hardware, an OPNsense router with VLAN-segmented networks, and a GPU box for running language models locally with llama.cpp. I'm currently building out an LXD cluster on NVMe-heavy machines and experimenting with OpenStack via Juju, both Sunbeam and Charmed OpenStack with Keystone backed by LDAP.

Home lab rack with a network switch and a hot-swap storage server, next to a wall-mounted Grafana monitoring dashboard
The rack, and the Grafana dashboard that keeps an eye on it.

Off the clock

Outside of work I like taking things apart, and sometimes they even go back together. When a GPU dies, I'll try fixing it before I'll buy a new one. I also put together a little battery and inverter box for off-grid power, mostly just to see if I could.

Probing a graphics card's power circuitry with a red clamp meter
RIP GPU. I tried.
Lithium battery wired to a Victron inverter and charge controller inside an enclosure
Tiny off-grid power box.

Then there's the WRX. It started with an exhaust and some suspension parts, and somehow ended with the engine hanging from a hoist in my garage. Not totally sure how that happened.

Engine hoisted out of a blue Subaru WRX in a garage
This is fine.
Dagmawi in a beanie and gloves next to the WRX's open engine bay with the front bumper removed
Everything's under control.
Long-haired tabby cat looking up through a window screen
Head of lab security.

Certifications

  • Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA), Cloud Native Computing Foundation
  • AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner, Amazon Web Services

Education

I studied at The University of Texas at Dallas.

Contact

The easiest way to reach me is a message on LinkedIn. If it's about code, open an issue on GitHub.