Overview
Jon Stuart runs Zikomo, a single-player technology consultancy based in Melbourne, Australia with over 25 years experience building and operating internet-facing services. Both bare metal and cloud, from startup and SME and the occasional enterprise.
My core work is generalist UNIX-shaped infrastructure and platform engineering: making different systems work together, keeping them running and performant, and building the tools developers need to ship - CI/CD, monitoring, deployment workflows.
Infrastructure as code with Terraform, Puppet and Chef underpins my work. Recent roles span greenfield GCP builds for startups, multi-cloud platform operations, on-premises FreeBSD fleets and z/OS mainframe tooling.
I'm experienced in cross-discipline troubleshooting and incident resolution in production environments. I bring a SRE and DevOps mindset to my work.
I have spent most of my career delivering as a consultant rather than as a permanent employee – through Zomo Technology in the UK and Zikomo here in Australia, across clients ranging from large media organisations to health-tech startups and fintech. That pattern means I arrive, get up to speed quickly, earn trust through delivery, and leave things in better shape than I found them.
On-premises
I have deep experience with FreeBSD, Linux and ZFS. Recently I built and operated a FreeBSD/ZFS platform from proof of concept to a multi-regional fleet over a six year period. I managed generational OS upgrades, multi-terabyte database migrations, and delivered a 75% cost savings compared to an equivalent cloud deployment. Previously I ran an on-premises Joyent / Triton stack, managing compute resources for microservice tenants and executing several datacentre migrations.
Cloud
I am skilled at building services and managing workloads on GCP and AWS. Recent work includes a ground-up GCP platform for a healthcare startup delivered on time and budget, and a project to consolidate a startup's diverse cloud and SaaS resources down to Fargate on AWS. I build CI/CD pipelines with Jenkins, GitHub Actions and CloudBuild.
Skills
- OS
- FreeBSD, Linux (Debian / Ubuntu / RHEL), Solaris (Oracle, Illumos, SmartOS)
- Storage
- ZFS
- Virtualisation
- Docker, bhyve, Jails, KVM, LXC
- IaC
- Terraform, Puppet, Chef, Ansible
- AWS
- EC2, ECS, Fargate, RDS, CloudFront, Secrets Manager, IAM, VPC
- GCP
- GCE, CloudRun, GKE, CloudSQL, CloudCDN, Secret Manager, IAM, VPC
- CI/CD
- Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GCP CloudBuild
- Databases
- PostgreSQL, MySQL, BigQuery
- Networking
- TCP/IP v4/v6, DNS, VLAN, Wireguard, OpenVPN
- Monitoring
- Nagios, Grafana, Prometheus
- Security
- X509 PKI, private CAs, VPN, firewalls
- Languages
- Ruby, Python, PHP, Perl, Bash
Contact
I'm available for short and long-term contracts, comfortable working 100% remote, and often a good fit for organisations that need the skills but not a full-time hire. Please say hello if you'd like to know more.