Stefan is an automation engineer at Centric IT Solutions, whose work involves simplifying data center and cloud management. From provisioning virtual servers to streamlining Azure cloud monitoring by collaborating with colleagues across borders he finds opportunities to grow within a diverse and dynamic environment. Learn more about his Centric experience from this short interview.
Can you provide an overview of your role at Centric IT Solutions and your responsibilities within project / teams?
I am working as an automation engineer / developer in a couple of projects namely a hybrid infrastructure virtual server provisioning services one and cloud management solutions one. The former involves automating mainly private datacenter activities like virtual machine provisioning and general platform processes, based on Microsoft’s Windows Azure Pack, while the latter is concerning the management and monitoring of Azure cloud customer environments through Azure policies.
What do you see as the biggest career opportunity?
There are lots of opportunities within Centric. One can find multiple technologies to dive into as a specialist, software architecture or even management-related challenges. I’ve seen people discovering a certain lack of a position in a specific area, make a successful pitch for it at the management level and assume that role.
Why did you choose Centric?
In 2015 I got word of an opening that was about automating datacenter resource deployment. Who in his right mind would pass out such an opportunity, right?
How do you and colleagues make each other better?
First of all, by sharing knowledge. It can be an article or a video describing a new way of working or module built by the community. Secondly is through the “four eyes principle” where we review each other’s work and contribute with comments and suggestions.
What is your favourite project/part of the job?
It’s “seeing” the code run. We have the possibility to quickly test our code and observe its execution.
What is your favourite project or part of working at Centric?
What makes it a great experience lies in the people that I get to work with. Our team projects have joint members from The Netherlands, Romania and Lithuania, which at first might sound like a handful, but in reality, we’re having a great time bouncing ideas and deciding on the best course of action.
What achievements or milestones are you particularly proud of?
I would say getting the datacenters migrated. It was the grandest endeavour I took part of in my whole life. Imagine thousands of servers being migrated over the data link without any issues, except for the unavoidable network-related ones.
What opportunities do you still hope to seize at Centric?
Just looking forward to the next datacenter migration… No, not really, however it is in a way, because the next move for many of our customers is the migration towards the “cloud” infrastructure, and there’s a ton of work to automate.