Arif Ali
Staff Support Engineer at Debian
Sheffield, England, United Kingdom
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolArif Ali is a Staff Support Engineer at Canonical with around 15 years of hands-on experience across Linux, HPC, OpenStack and cloud deployments, and two decades of domain exposure in motorsport, education, research and telco. He has a track record of designing and supporting large-scale systems using MaaS, Juju, Charms and OpenStack and has driven provisioning initiatives such as xCAT (including Ubuntu provisioning) and benchmarking projects at OCF. Known for pragmatic problem-solving, he contributes bug fixes and enhancements to upstream tools like sosreport and maintains active involvement in open-source reviews and repositories (xcat-core and OpenStack Gerrit). His work spans the full stack from Debian packaging and Debian maintenance to configuration management and systemd integration, enabling repeatable deployments of compute, cloud and storage. Colleagues recognize him for consistent reliability and deep systems knowledge that bridge operational support and development. Based in Sheffield, he pairs an academic background in advanced computer science with a long history of customer-facing technical leadership.
15 years of coding experience
19 years of employment as a software developer
A Levels Mathematics Physics Chemistry, A Levels Mathematics Physics Chemistry at Newham Sixth Form College (NewVIc)Little Ilford SchoolMaster’s Degree Advanced Topics in Computer Science, Master’s Degree Advanced Topics in Computer Science at Queen Mary University of London
English, Urdu, Punjabi, Hindi
Github Skills (11)
system-administration10
provisioning10
deploying10
debian10
infrastructure-management10
networking9
ipxe9
configuration-management8
clustering7
cluster-computing7
remote-execution7
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
xcat2/xcat-core
Apr 2012 - Jul 2017
Code repo for xCAT core packages
Role in this project:
Back-end & DevOps Engineer
Back-end & DevOps EngineerContributions:67 commits, 16 PRs, 81 comments in 5 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Arif contributed to the xCAT core packages, primarily focusing on server-side logic and infrastructure management. Their work involved modifying Debian installation scripts, adding support for netinst ISOs, and implementing features related to hostname prefixing. They also addressed issues related to route configuration and incorporated systemd integration. The user demonstrated skills in system administration, scripting, and potentially configuration management.
bare-metalprovisioningremote-executioninfrastructureinfrastructure-management
LineageOS/android_device_htc_leo
Apr 2011 - Feb 2012
Contributions:16 commits in 10 months
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