Jesse Pretorius
Associate Manager - OpenStack Platform Upgrades, Backup & Recovery
England, United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJesse Pretorius is an experienced OpenStack and cloud infrastructure leader with 13 years building and operating large-scale private cloud, CI/CD and upgrade systems, now managing OpenStack platform upgrades, backup and recovery at Red Hat. He combines hands-on engineering with program leadership—having led release engineering and CI platforms at Rackspace, served as PTL for OpenStack-Ansible, and contributed significant templating and automation improvements to TripleO heat templates. Jesse is skilled in Ansible, Jenkins/Zuul, Ceph, KVM, and automation patterns (Jinja, YAML anchors) and has a track record of simplifying complex upgrade and deployment workflows to improve maintainability and performance. He mentors open source contributors, curates CI gates, and emphasizes documentation and upgrade safety—practical strengths reflected in both enterprise roles and community leadership. Notably, his background spans founding a consultancy to scaling cross-continental teams, giving him rare operational empathy for both product and operator needs.
13 years of coding experience
19 years of employment as a software developer
Certified Participlan Facilitator, Certified Participlan Facilitator at Business Presentation GroupIntroduction to HR Management, Introduction to HR Management at Siyakha ConsultingSenior Certificate, English, Afrikaans, Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, Computer Science, Biology, Advanced Mathematics, Senior Certificate, English, Afrikaans, Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, Computer Science, Biology, Advanced Mathematics at MichaelhousePRINCE2 Foundations Certificate, PRINCE2 Foundations Certificate at Pink Elephant / SPOCECertified Novell Administrator (v4), Certified Novell Administrator (v4) at NovellCustomer Support Specialist, Customer Support Specialist at Help Desk InstituteBSc (Eng), Electronic, BSc (Eng), Electronic at University of KwaZulu-NatalITILv3 Foundations Certificate, ITILv3 Foundations Certificate at Pink ElephantBladeLogic 8.0 Foundation and Reporting, BladeLogic 8.0 Foundation and Reporting at BMC
English
Github Skills (10)
ansible-galaxy10
automation10
automations10
temp10
jinjava10
heat10
yaml10
ansible10
cicd9
openstack9
Programming languages (15)
Github contributions (5)
openstack-archive/tripleo-heat-templates
Oct 2019 - Dec 2021
RETIRED, Heat templates for deploying OpenStack. Mirror of code maintained at opendev.org.
Role in this project:
DevOps Engineer
DevOps EngineerContributions:89 commits in 2 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Jesse primarily contributed to the automation and templating aspects of the OpenStack deployment, specifically focusing on the TripleO Heat templates. They refactored Ansible playbooks by leveraging Jinja blocks, YAML anchors/aliases, and by switching from `import_tasks` to `include_tasks` to optimize performance and reduce code repetition. These changes aimed to streamline deployment steps and improve maintainability. The user also updated branch names for fast-forward upgrades and removed unnecessary whitespace.
openstack
rcbops/rpc-artifacts
Dec 2016 - Feb 2018
Contributions:78 PRs, 61 pushes, 45 branches in 1 year 2 months
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