Ben Whaley | Cloud & InfoSec Engineer

Hi, I'm Ben. I've been working professionally in software and technology, most especially in cloud and infosec, since 2004.

Skills & Expertise

Tools

Code

CI/CD

Backend

Telemetry

Systems

Networks

Cloud

Security

Writing

Teaching

Coffee

Writing

Co-author of The UNIX & Linux System Administration Handbook, the de facto system administration reference book. Now in the 5th edition.
Articles on the Gruntwork blog.
Article in INSECURE magazine [WARNING: 11.8Mb PDF link] on the subject of enterprise software security.
A few technical blog posts (archive), including classics like:
- encrypting ephemeral volumes
- the reference VPC architecture

Code

My GitHub profile.
alterNAT, a high availability implementation of AWS NAT instances.
alterNAT CDK, a CDK implementation of alterNAT, in Typescript.
ssmsh, an interactive shell for the EC2 Parameter Store, in Go.
Contributed to several open source tools at Gruntwork, including Terragrunt, Terratest, boilerplate, cloud-nuke, and kubergrunt.
Proprietary projects in Go, Python, Bash, Javascript, Ruby, C, and other languages.
IaC work using Cloudformation, Terraform, Ansible, Chef, Puppet, etc.

Projects

Refactored the Gruntwork Reference Architecture, a battle-tested, production-grade, fully automated, end-to-end multi-account AWS environment.

While at Gruntwork, implemented the CIS AWS Foundations Benchmark using Terraform and Terragrunt.

Recorded two videos for Addison-Wesley/Pearson, listed on O'Reilly: Linux System Administration and Linux Web Operations.

Media

A collection of my slides on Speakerdeck.
Interview with me on the tutorial linux Youtube channel.
A Cloud Economist is Born – The AlterNAT Origin Story - I joined Corey Quinn for an episode of the Screaming in the Cloud podcast.
Talk at AWS re:Invent 2017 And You Thought You Knew EC2.

Recognition

Recognized by Amazon Web Services as a Community Hero 2014-2024 for fostering developer interest in AWS through articles, books, talks, and tools. 8x re:Invent attendee.

Endorsements

In a matter of months his leadership and follow-through created change which was not possible in his absence. His passion for his work and excellent communication brought our team together and our work excelled due to his desire for accuracy and quality.
— Megan Modl, former colleague

Ben is the best information security and operations professional I have worked with. Ben understands AWS in and out. I consider myself lucky to have worked with such a focused and objective leader. Ben is very honest, a team player and follows through. Ben would be an asset to any team.
— Laban Okune, former colleague

Ben is one of the most skilled systems architects I have ever worked with. He was extremely effective at troubleshooting and diagnostics, configuring monitoring and alerting, picking up and incorporating new technologies all while moving the architecture forward.
— Nate McCall, former colleague

Professional Bio

Ben Whaley is a software engineer at Chime. He was previously a software engineer at Gruntwork.io, and was the founder of WhaleTech, a software consultancy in the Bay area. He also ran infrastructure for Apigee, a globally-distributed API management platform built on Amazon Web Services, and built and operated the AWS-hosted back end services for Anki, a robotics and artificial intelligence company in San Francisco.

Ben is co-author of the UNIX and Linux System Administration Handbook, the de facto standard text on Linux administration, and is the author of two educational videos: Linux Web Operations and Linux System Administration.

Ben has held Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) and Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) certifications. He earned a B.S. in Computer Science from University of Colorado, Boulder.