Overview
GreenQloud was an Icelandic cloud company building private cloud solutions on Apache CloudStack. Over three years I progressed from extending CloudStack's Java core to architecting full private cloud deployments and delivering specialized bare metal HPC infrastructure for enterprise clients.
The company was later acquired by NetApp (now part of NetApp Cloud).
Phase 1: Core Developer (Dec 2013 – Aug 2014)
Extended core capabilities of Apache CloudStack in Java to enhance cloud platform functionality:
- Developed custom features and integrations expanding the platform's enterprise capabilities
- Contributed to CloudStack's core to support GreenQloud's private cloud service offering
- Collaborated with engineering teams implementing scalable solutions
Phase 2: Senior Deployment Engineer (Aug 2014 – Apr 2016)
Private Cloud Automation
- Architected and developed cloud infrastructure using Chef automation and Apache CloudStack, enabling scalable private cloud solutions for enterprise clients
- Pioneered automated deployment processes for private cloud components, reducing setup time and enabling GreenQloud's private cloud service offering
- Implemented continuous delivery pipeline that accelerated software delivery and improved quality through automated testing
- Integrated Swift object storage into GreenQloud's private cloud platform
Bare Metal HPC for Automotive
The most technically complex work at GreenQloud: delivering HPC infrastructure to automotive clients who needed high-performance bare metal compute with full network isolation.
- Developed bare metal provisioning capabilities for Apache CloudStack — automated ethernet and InfiniBand switch configuration supporting multi-tenant environments
- Built automated switch configuration for both ethernet and InfiniBand fabrics, enabling isolated HPC networks per tenant without manual intervention
- Delivered CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) workloads on bare metal for automotive engineering simulations — the performance demands of automotive CFD made virtualization overhead completely unacceptable
This work directly seeded what would become HPCFLOW: the realization that bare metal + InfiniBand + automation could deliver HPC-as-a-Service at enterprise scale.
Technologies
- Platform: Apache CloudStack, OpenStack Swift
- Languages: Java, Python, Bash
- Automation: Chef, custom provisioning tooling
- Networking: InfiniBand, automated switch configuration (ethernet + IB)
- HPC Workloads: CFD (automotive), bare metal compute
- Storage: Swift object storage, distributed filesystems