russell.ballestrini.net/content/pages/cover-letters/2025-11-03-canonical-russell-ballestrini.rst

Canonical - Containerization & Virtualisation Engineer
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:date: 2025-10-28

To Canonical:

Over the past 15 years, I have dedicated much of my time to server administration of Ubuntu desktops, and headless servers & virtualized workloads across countless hypervisors to increase the density of software & programs to physical hardware. My early efforts span Jails in FreeBSD, KVM in Ubuntu 6.04 LTS, XEN on RHEL, VirtualBox on workstations. During my tenure with CSC (General Dynamics DoD contractor. 2006-2012) I established a process & Python program called `virt-back` (https://pypi.org/project/virt-back/) to safely shutdown, snapshot, & start virtual machines across all libvirt hypervisors. The process works across various device storage backends & was recently upgraded to support TrueNAS Scale (Debian based) with KVM hosts running with ZFS file storage, using ZFS snapshots to perform perfect datasets to send or recieve across the network! 

At Remind (2017-2020), we exclusively scaled Ubuntu EC2 servers on AWS, running over 60 microservices of varying upstreams GNU/Linux & supporting millions of users with & scaling during COVID-19. During this period, during a hackathon, webwords emerged as a project to accerate my understanding of Docker containers. This year, I expanded webwords with images supporting over 42 programming languages demonstrating the same problem being solved in as many different languages as possible.

During my 3 years at Coursemojo (2022-2025) I helped the the skeleton crew of a product team pivot & bring to market Mojo, an AI Teacher Assistant for Public schools. Mojo has two monolithic Python services running Docker ECS containers on Fargate which drive the entire student, teacher, admin, and curriculum creation pages. I was hired as an engineer to work on DevOps product pipelines & transitioned to full stack engineer to build student & teacher facing behavors.

My current self-hosted GitLab infrastructure manages production systems (https://www.unturf.com/software) exclusively using Ubuntu for build hosts & virtualization. GitLab CI runners orchestrating builds & deployments to my development & production products & services. My favorite thing about FOSS is engaging with upstream communities, publishing tools for the world to use.

Canonical's mission to enable open source innovation across AI, IoT, & cloud platforms resonates deeply with my own ambitions. Years of building boundary-pushing tools include pioneering libvirt-based backup automation (virt-back), implementing hot wallet crypto payments (Make Post Sell), & documenting AI inference patterns across dozens of languages (uncloseai.com). Performance optimizations to keep costs down & build resilient systems that scale remain one of my core passions. I'd love to apply my experiences with libvirt, KVM, Docker, & LXD to contribute meaningfully to Ubuntu's containerization & virtualisation capabilities. I look forward to hearing from the Canonical team either, way. Thank you for the time!

Russell Ballestrini