Q – Ash, can you tell us about the role that you have with Dstny Automate and the work that you do for us?
Yeah. So, I’m a Senior Dev Ops Engineer at Dstny Automate. So my role is centered around improving how we deploy the applications written by developers into the production cloud infrastructure. That encompasses the whole journey from the initial commit of the code to source control, where we build and test the application through to the automation pipeline, where we deploy the application to development environments, further testing and eventually on to production where it can start being used by customers.
So involved in that is a large amount of automation of cloud services for which we use a lot of different tools, including Azure DevOps, TerraForm and Ansible. I work as part of the wider platform team who maintains and build out the cloud infrastructure. Particularly I am focused on how we improve the deployments and high availability during the deployment of our different types of applications. My role has a large focus on service reliability and as part of that, I work on providing monitoring tools for the operations and development teams to ensure we have better visibility on production issues when they occur, and can correlate the customer impact to failures in the platform. But also so we can report on capacity and how customers use our platform. So we can make plans for future, and capacity initiatives. Specifically, I’m working on a new monitoring stack for the business using open source tooling such as Theano, Prometheus and Loki, which is aiming to unlock a huge number of different metrics that we can start visualizing and reporting.
Q – Wow, a huge breadth of responsibility there. So let’s take a step back, when you joined us in April, how did you find the joining process? Did it run smoothly? What was it like joining a 100% remote first company?
A – Yeah, so I joined at the end of April this year, so still fairly new. What struck me most about the interview process was just how approachable the team were, it almost just felt like exciting techies having a conversation about the infrastructure, which got me really excited to join. And yeah, I was a bit apprehensive before joining as I’d never worked for a company fully remote before or worked in the voice communication sector before, but the team has been amazing, spending the time to get me up to speed with the platform answering any of my questions. The onboarding documentation we have is actually quite good. That really helped me when I was getting started. And the team now is still really great at answering my stupid or silly questions, even though there is no such thing as a stupid question! Yeah, it just seems like the team, as it is still quite a small team, is really really approachable and it just feels like a team from day one really.
Q – Excellent! That leads me to the next question. What do you like most about working for Dstny Automate?
The thing I like the most is that I get to take ownership of my role, and I get the autonomy to plan and design a lot of this new tooling that I’m working on from the ground up. The management team really give priority to looking forward and building out new pieces of tooling. And if I have anything that I want to try out, I have the responsibility where I can just go and do that and really plan for the future. It’s a really fast paced environment where we need to get stuff done quickly, and that’s really exciting to be working with a group of really intelligent people that are working towards the same goal. We all compliment each other really nicely with our different skill sets. So yeah, I’m learning a lot about the voice communication sector, and learning a lot of cool new technology which I was really interested to pick up.