Frédéric Perrin — Network software engineer

Professional experience

AT&T

Senior Software QA engineer for Vyatta, the software router powering more and more of the AT&T network, from 5G edge to MPLS forwarding.

Since the Vyatta acquisition by AT&T, I've continued to help improve its quality and dependability across a number of areas, including IPv6 routing; hosting of VNF guests including Cisco CSR1000v and Juniper vSRX; a from-scratch CGNAT implementation; port of forwarding features from software to various silicon chips; and more. I am the main Vyatta tester on FlexWare.

I ensure the reliability of our testing by maintaining our Python automated installation tool, used by the QA team; implementing Atlassian code-quality tooling; deploying continuous integration solutions based on Jenkins.

The DANOS project is an open-source release of much of the Vyatta software under the Linux Foundation umbrella, check it out!

July 2017 to present.

Brocade

Software QA engineer for Vyatta, a software router running on standard whitebox hardware or even as a virtual machine to offer flexibility, lower cost without sacrificing performance.

Some areas of testing: a new IPv6 ND implementation, virtio interface drivers, and a new VRF implementation.

My responsibilities included:

organising and communicating the testing effort by authoring test plans,
conformance testing against RFC standards,
automating most of the testing effort in Python to enable continuous regression testing, and thus ensuring the quality of the code in the future,
security testing using the THC IPv6 toolkit in order to find weaknesses and scale issues.

January 2015 to July 2017.

Cisco

Worked on testing for CEF (Cisco Express Forwarding, IPv4 and IPv6) and MFI (the MPLS forwarding infrastructure), on IOS classic and IOS-XE.

I wrote new scripts, either reproducing real-world issues found in customer networks, or testing of new features. Skills required: MPLS and IP knowledge, routing protocols (OSPF, BGP), understanding of how Cisco features are deployed in customer networks. Programming language was TCL.

I investigated failures uncovered during automated testing. Skills required: advanced Cisco IOS troubleshooting, understanding a network topology, investigating interactions between e.g. routing protocols, being able to describe the relevant configuration details to a development engineer.

I supported the remote teams for their re-use of our testing script in their own regression testing.

Installed hardware in our test lab (6500, 7600, ASR, 3900, 3750).

Installed of a dashboard aimed at testers and developers in order to track known failures and highlight new issues.

August 2012 to October 2014.

Orange

Acceptance testing of the WAN connections of the Schengen Information System, which enable the police forces of 25+ European states to collaborate. Migration of the network infrastructure from the previous provider to the Orange network. Cisco equipment, monitoring with HP NNMi, security with Thales DCAP. Consultancy via Altran, January 2012 to June 2012.

SWIFT

Testing of back-office applications. Definition of test protocols, automation with Perl, installation of development artefacts (Oracle procedures under Solaris), assessment of the release quality before roll-out. Consultancy via Altran, July to December 2011.

Télécom Bretagne, Networking department

Roll-out of a Dual-Stack Lite mock-up, an IPv4 to IPv6 transition mechanism. Study of the behaviour of end-user machines under stress conditions. Our findings were published in the IEEE ICC'12 conference (June 2012). Internship, January to March 2011.

Télécom Bretagne, CS department

Automatic generation of SSE code for the PIPS source-to-source compiler, extension of a Python API for the composition of compilation phases. Internship, July to September 2010.

Alcatel

Virtualisation with VMware of databases (MySQL under RedHat), daily administration of the virtual infrastructure, installation of new servers. Automation (with Powershell, Perl, Python) of the installation of new virtual machines, used for the provisioning of customer systems. School gap year, July 2009 to June 2010.

Education

2013: MEF CECP
2013: CCNA
Oct 2011: ITILv3 Foundation Certificate
2007—2011: Télécom Bretagne, engineering degree (equiv. to M.Sc.), "Systems, Software and Network" program. GPA 3.85
2007—2008: Université de Bretagne Occidentale, Mathematics degree, with honours

Benevolent experience

ResEl: Benevolent administrator of the Students' Network (600 users). Extensive use of Debian GNU/Linux, virtualisation with Zen, configuration of network services : Apache, Open SSH, Post fix. Managed Clans, routing using Cisco gear. Member of the board of directors and treasurer. Brest, 2007 to 2011.
Robotic team of Télécom Bretagne: Programming of the robot (ATmega micro-controller, in C, HCTL motion controller). La Ferté-Bernard, French robotic cups of May 2008 and 2009, seven months each.
Fencing: President of the school fencing club (2007—2008), practised at an amateur level during secondary school.

Languages

French: Mother tongue.
English: Professional proficiency.
Spanish: B1 level.