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Ben Larabie

PROFILE

Ben Larabie

Over 16 months, contributed to the cds-snc/notification-manifests and related repositories by building scalable, secure notification infrastructure and deployment automation. Leveraged Python, YAML, and Terraform to deliver features such as dynamic environment configuration, Helm-based deployment management, and robust CI/CD pipelines. Implemented observability with OpenTelemetry and Signoz, enhanced security through RBAC and secrets management, and optimized resource usage with autoscaling and backup solutions. Focused on reliability and maintainability, the work included performance tuning, automated testing, and infrastructure as code practices. These efforts improved deployment velocity, operational visibility, and system resilience across multi-environment Kubernetes and AWS-based notification services.

Overall Statistics

Feature vs Bugs

72%Features

Repository Contributions

235Total
Bugs
41
Commits
235
Features
107
Lines of code
69,910
Activity Months16

Work History

February 2026

41 Commits • 30 Features

Feb 1, 2026

February 2026 performance summary focusing on delivering scalable deployments, improved observability, and increased reliability across the CDS notification stack. Key outcomes include: - Dynamic Gunicorn runtime configuration for scalable deployment (notification-api) enabling environment-driven worker tuning for flexible scaling and cost/perf optimization. Representative commits: 7950137d451519edd54eb61a0d4d4109144807c9. - OpenTelemetry-based observability enhancements with API monitoring improvements, test stabilization, and Celery handling refinements (notification-api). Representative commits: 7d32ad9352cf529b9607be4e8aaac2538985b1a8. - Hardened operational readiness in manifests: Gunicorn config hardening (notification-manifests), Velero backup scheduling, Prometheus DaemonSet manifest updates, and increased probe timeouts to aid troubleshooting. Representative commits: 36c634e7f472507dc851b5f893dd5e0203cee651; c3064c752ab4c82f15c424ae54aa077c00362f00; 4f0462881508d69649323237c2ab3eff968ae4b3; 6d0bac735b5495fadb8827ceb70b21e20a00d199. - Signoz deployment, resiliency, and environment hardening in staging: enabling Signoz in staging, storage class improvements, admin staging workflows, and related stability fixes; ongoing staging adjustments including enable/disable cycles and dashboard/import fixes. Representative commits include: b998e91101ddbb57d4d9a7e450908b71b866e13f; c04ae21b80e146844942da82155a48c43a62ac02; 4477/4489 series. - Expanded monitoring and dashboards: Signoz MLP for Celery, AWS CloudWatch Metrics integration, and CloudWatch dashboards/logs enhancements, plus dashboard import job configuration and Kubernetes readiness improvements. Representative commits: 6d2965067e6f15dfbe90c48aa4688bf518c4340c; 041955459d023c494501442e993ee44eedff81e4; ebdcd9c6c44880301b5b1f343d4be091da71067d. - Data protection and reliability improvements: Velero backup scheduling and broader resilience work across the Signoz stack to ensure data protection and recovery options.

January 2026

21 Commits • 7 Features

Jan 1, 2026

January 2026 performance-driven delivery for cds-snc/notification-manifests focused on production readiness, security monitoring, and scalable operations. Implemented Falco-based observability in development and staging, migrated admin components to Kubernetes API, and tuned API performance with autoscaling and resource governance. Enabled automated secret reloads via Stakater reloader and aligned development/test environments with internal API routing for parity and faster feedback loops.

December 2025

5 Commits • 3 Features

Dec 1, 2025

December 2025 monthly summary focused on delivering deployment flexibility, resource efficiency, and system stability across the notification services. Key outcomes include dynamic Velero IAM ARN configuration for environment-aware deployments, Celery autoscaling optimization, CI workflow concurrency controls to reduce staging conflicts, a production SMS rate-limit stability revert, and improved configuration management with .env-based environment variable loading. These efforts contributed to lower operational costs, higher deployment reliability, and smoother CI/CD processes.

November 2025

13 Commits • 6 Features

Nov 1, 2025

Month: 2025-11 – This month delivered security, scalability, and reliability improvements across notification services, with focus on RBAC/security, throughput, and observability, plus targeted config fixes to enable stable operations across multiple repositories.

October 2025

8 Commits • 5 Features

Oct 1, 2025

Monthly work summary for Oct 2025 highlighting key features delivered, major observability/data-protection improvements, environment standardization, and governance decisions across three repos. Focus on business value delivered and technical achievements.

September 2025

3 Commits • 2 Features

Sep 1, 2025

September 2025 monthly summary for cds-snc/notification-manifests and cds-snc/notification-api. Key deliveries focused on throughput, configurability, and observability to drive business capacity and reliability. - Key features delivered: - SMS Delivery Rate Limiting: Environment-Specific Throughput and Dynamic Configuration. Staging up to 20 msgs/s; production up to 20/msg per second; dynamic templating in celery.yaml.gotmpl; per-environment scaling. Commits: ea6462cb56bbea8de3f6736a2cecab6e16316dfa; de736b07c66e3092db7a8d9573a8242b21fded4d - New Relic Monitoring Enablement for Notification API: NR agent initialization and app registration. Commit: 329829f3c5f82a2a49e9c5db8ce557a44438d7b2 - Major bugs fixed: - No major bugs closed this period; focus remained on throughput improvements and observability. - Overall impact and accomplishments: - Increased messaging capacity to meet higher load (staging 20 msg/s; production 20 msg/s). - Improved observability with NR monitoring for the notification API. - Template-driven configuration reduces operational friction and improves per-environment scaling readiness. - Technologies/skills demonstrated: - Celery dynamic templating and YAML templating (gotmpl). - Per-environment configuration management and scaling. - New Relic agent integration and performance monitoring. - Strong traceability with commit-level references.

August 2025

4 Commits • 3 Features

Aug 1, 2025

In August 2025, the CDS notification-manifests repository delivered three high-impact updates focused on infrastructure reliability, security, and governance. Key changes streamlined infrastructure management, hardened logs, and reduced monitoring spend, improving both deployment quality and security posture.

July 2025

11 Commits • 3 Features

Jul 1, 2025

July 2025 monthly summary: Achieved stability and deployment efficiency gains across notification services through cache architecture improvements, environment configuration alignment, and deployment simplifications, complemented by targeted rollbacks and improved CI notifications.

June 2025

1 Commits • 1 Features

Jun 1, 2025

June 2025 monthly summary for cds-snc/terraform-modules: Delivered configurable VPN Client Certificate Lifecycle Configuration to enable flexible certificate validity and early renewal. Implemented new input variables in the client VPN module and updated the TLS self-signed certificate resource to utilize these parameters, enabling automated and policy-aligned certificate lifecycle management. No critical bugs reported in this scope; maintenance focused on reliability and policy compliance. This work reduces manual certificate rotation overhead and supports scalable module usage across deployments.

May 2025

18 Commits • 6 Features

May 1, 2025

May 2025 performance summary across cds-snc/notification-manifests, cds-snc/notification-api, and cds-snc/notification-admin. Delivered cross-repo improvements focused on reliability, scalability, and observability. Key features include Image Pull Secrets Management via Helm across kube-system and amazon-cloudwatch namespaces, Karpenter node provisioning and HPA tuning with production-specific adjustments, Nidhogg integration for development and staging with production removals, and New Relic deployment toggles to control observability by environment. A critical reliability fix disabled Celery Pod Disruption Budget for Celery Reports with adjusted minAvailable to maintain service continuity. Also stabilized build environments in notification-api/admin by incorporating virtualenv into Docker builds and broadening CI ignore rules for cleaner, repeatable pipelines.

April 2025

10 Commits • 3 Features

Apr 1, 2025

April 2025 monthly summary for cds-snc/notification-manifests focused on delivering reliable upgrade automation, stronger security, and improved observability across environments. The team implemented a cohesive Karpenter upgrade flow with environment-aware versioning and on-demand capacity scheduling, fortified by IMDSv2 security hardening, culminating in production upgrade readiness. Observability and operations were enhanced via CloudWatch agent upgrades and configuration improvements, including debug mode and region handling, plus increased CPU resources for higher throughput. Private image pulls were enabled by adding Docker Hub image pull secrets to critical service accounts. Stability was increased through staged deployments and rollback exercises to ensure a safe upgrade path to prod. Key outcomes include reduced upgrade risk, faster deployment cycles, better runtime visibility, and the ability to pull private images for core notification components.

March 2025

17 Commits • 5 Features

Mar 1, 2025

Month: 2025-03 — CDS notification-manifests delivered production-safe observability, reliability, and deployment hygiene improvements. Key features and fixes delivered across the repo are summarized below with business value and technical achievements.

February 2025

18 Commits • 9 Features

Feb 1, 2025

February 2025 highlights: Delivered a major shift to Helm-based cert-manager deployment management, enabling centralized lifecycle controls and more predictable upgrades across environments. Introduced a Freshdesk integration feature flag to safely toggle customer support integration, reducing rollout risk. Improved observability and reliability with Fluent Bit enhancements (dynamic cluster-based log grouping and Celery multiline parsing), and refined CI workflows for Helmfile diffs to make changes auditable and easier to review. Executed comprehensive configuration cleanup and deprecation to harden environments and simplify future changes (removing outdated vars, tightening env loading). Across the portfolio, stabilizing CI/CD caches (npm and Python requirements) and minor UI/CI improvements contributed to faster builds and more consistent deployments. These efforts collectively lower operational risk, accelerate delivery, and improve engineering efficiency while delivering measurable business value.

January 2025

27 Commits • 11 Features

Jan 1, 2025

January 2025 monthly summary for cds-snc/notification-manifests focused on delivering scalable production readiness, reliable release processes, and improved operational hygiene. Key work spanned feature delivery, reliability fixes, and tooling improvements across the repository, with several changes designed to reduce deployment risk and optimize resource usage in production.

December 2024

11 Commits • 3 Features

Dec 1, 2024

December 2024 monthly summary: Delivered critical fixes, rollout controls, and observability improvements across notification-admin, notification-manifests, and notification-api. Focused on security posture, deployment reliability, and environment-aware configurations to accelerate safe releases and improve customer-facing reliability.

November 2024

27 Commits • 10 Features

Nov 1, 2024

Monthly summary for 2024-11: Across all notification services, delivered higher reliability, security, and automation through a mix of new features, tooling consolidations, and robust secret management. Key outcomes include enabling Cypress-based database migration testing in API deployment, consolidating deployment tooling under Helmfile for production/staging, standardizing secrets across CI/CD, and automating VPN/config workflows for staging and local development. These efforts reduce risk, shorten release cycles, and provide a clearer security posture for multi-environment deployments.

Activity

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Quality Metrics

Correctness89.0%
Maintainability88.8%
Architecture86.4%
Performance82.8%
AI Usage21.2%

Skills & Technologies

Programming Languages

BashCSSDockerfileGoGo TemplateGo templateGo templatingGoTemplHCLJSON

Technical Skills

API DevelopmentAPI IntegrationAPI ManagementAPI developmentAPMAWSAWS LambdaAWS servicesAlerting SystemsBackend DevelopmentBackup SolutionsBackup and RecoveryBranch ProtectionCI/CDCSS

Repositories Contributed To

6 repos

Overview of all repositories you've contributed to across your timeline

cds-snc/notification-manifests

Nov 2024 Feb 2026
15 Months active

Languages Used

ShellYAMLyamlGo templateenvGo templatingGoTemplMarkdown

Technical Skills

AWSCI/CDConfiguration ManagementDevOpsGitHub ActionsHelm

cds-snc/notification-api

Nov 2024 Feb 2026
9 Months active

Languages Used

YAMLPythonDockerfileShell

Technical Skills

AWSCI/CDDevOpsGitHub ActionsSecrets ManagementTerraform

cds-snc/notification-admin

Nov 2024 Feb 2026
6 Months active

Languages Used

BashYAMLCSSDockerfilePythonShell

Technical Skills

AWSCI/CDDevOpsGitHub ActionsInfrastructure as CodeDocker

cds-snc/notification-document-download-api

Nov 2024 Dec 2025
4 Months active

Languages Used

YAMLPython

Technical Skills

CI/CDDevOpsSecrets ManagementGitHub Actionsbackend developmentmonitoring and logging

cds-snc/notification-documentation

Nov 2024 Jul 2025
3 Months active

Languages Used

YAML

Technical Skills

CI/CDDevOpsGitHub Actions

cds-snc/terraform-modules

Jun 2025 Oct 2025
2 Months active

Languages Used

HCL

Technical Skills

Infrastructure as CodeTerraformAWS Lambda