"Ryan Umstead is a Senior Engineer II in the Aladdin Product Group at BlackRock. BlackRock is the world’s largest investment management company and Aladdin is BlackRock’s end-to-end investment and risk management technology that we use internally to run our investments business and deliver externally to other financial institutions. In Ryan’s role he focus on the platform underpinning Aladdin with specialization in distributed systems, containers, microservices, cloud technologies, automation, and software development. Ryan is leading a small set of software engineers that :
Defined and maintained a configuration strategy for clusters and applications using Helm and Kustomize to support environment variance across 100+ production environments.
Created idempotent pipelines to automatically deploy standard components to vanilla Kubernetes clusters such as namespaces, quotas, CRDs, security scanners, telemetry components, and ingress controllers.
Managed a GitOps engine (ArgoCD) which deploys to over a hundred clusters.
Constructed CI pipelines to lint and validate Kubernetes resources using kubeval and kube-linter (OPA soon). These pipelines ensure that our manifests are using best practices.
Built infrastructure and workflows to migrate off proprietary orchestration system to containers and Kubernetes. Including updating SDLC for containers, supporting attestation, and enforcing best practices.
Ryan graduated cum laude from Drexel University in 2015 with a BS degree in Computer Science and a minor in Business Administration."