Hi, I’m Simon Cho — a database engineer turned DevOps leader in Los Angeles. I own DevOps and DBA at Nowcom: two departments, with teams across four countries. Most of my time now goes to deployment pipelines, Kubernetes and platform reliability; the database engineering this blog started out on is the foundation underneath all of it.
Career
| Role | What it involved | |
|---|---|---|
| Nowcom · Los Angeles | AVP of DevOps & DBA | Accountable for two departments, DevOps and DBA — teams across the US, Korea, the Philippines and India — while staying hands-on in architecture. Around 5,000 deployments a month across several hundred pipelines, each release out in under 15 minutes, on an in-house rollout system we built for the parallel, multi-environment deployments GitOps’ linear workflow couldn’t express. Also own cloud infrastructure and GitHub organization security, and run the company’s Claude deployment — building internal AI agents for engineering operations, including an on-premise SRE agent developed in-house. |
| Visa · Bellevue | Staff Database Engineer | Set database standards and topology across the platform, researched and introduced newer technology against industry best practice, and mentored the team supporting SQL Server frontline. |
| Nexon America · Los Angeles | Sr. DBA | Multi-terabyte databases for a game publisher: ~50 replication servers and their performance tuning, backup and monitoring operations, migrations and game patch support. |
Talks & community
- Co-founded SQLAngeles, the Los Angeles PASS chapter and the only PASS user group that ran in Korean — Tuesday-evening study sessions and talks for the Korean-speaking data community in LA. The group is no longer active.
- PASS Summit 2019, Seattle — Database CI/CD: Continuous Integration and Deployment
- PASS Data Community Summit 2021 — Can SQL Server run on Kubernetes?
- SQL Saturday speaker, 2014–2019: Orange County (×3), Los Angeles, San Diego, Silicon Valley, Sacramento, Redmond (×2), Dallas, Oklahoma City, South Florida, Huntington Beach.
The full list with slides and demo scripts is on the Talks page.
What I work on
These days the work is mostly DevOps and platform engineering; the database side is the foundation it sits on rather than the day job.
- Deployment at scale — ~5,000 deployments a month across several hundred pipelines, each release out in under 15 minutes, and the in-house rollout system we built when GitOps’ linear workflow stopped fitting
- AI in engineering operations — administering the company’s Claude deployment and building internal agents, including an on-premise SRE agent developed in-house: what they genuinely take off a platform team’s plate, and what they don’t
- Developer platform & security — GitHub organization security: code and secret scanning, dependency and branch policy, and access control across the org
- Cloud & edge — cloud infrastructure management (Azure), and Cloudflare at the edge in front of it
- Kubernetes & GitOps — multi-cluster Argo CD, controller behaviour under load, and the failure modes that only show up at fleet size
- Platform reliability — observability, on-call, incident review, and the tooling that keeps a distributed team across four countries shipping safely
- Database engineering — CI/CD for schema, high availability, and the SQL Server internals work this blog started out on
About this blog
Simon’s SQL started in March 2011 as a place to keep the SQL Server troubleshooting notes I kept re-deriving. It grew to 140 posts on performance tuning, high availability, backup/recovery, T-SQL utilities and — later — containers and database CI/CD. In August 2026 it moved from WordPress.com to Hugo with all posts, URLs, images and comments intact.
Contact
- LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/simonsql
- Email: simon@simonsql.com
- GitHub: @SimonSQLML
Questions about deployment at scale, AI agents in engineering operations, Kubernetes and GitOps, or database CI/CD and HA design are always welcome.