Interviewer: Sushrut Vyas, Tech Correspondent
Interviewee: Gaurav Desai, DevOps Team Leader
Sushrut: Good afternoon, Gaurav. Thank you for taking the time to chat with us today. Could you please introduce yourself and tell us about your role as a Team Leader of the DevOps Team?
Gaurav: Good afternoon, Sushrut. It’s my pleasure to be here. I am a DevOps Team Leader at Cygnet Infotech Pvt ltd. I lead a team of 3 brilliant DevOps engineers and constantly work along with the team on Deployments for our premium clients who are actively using our product to file their waybills and all tax-related entries and filing. We have private and public hosting services available for all our clients and we also have the clientele who we have to deliver products and changes on their on-premise systems. I take responsibility for any instance of software stopping working or taking the rollback action upon instructions from senior stakeholders. My team along with the delivery of a large clientele also helps other teams in operations such as technical support, Account management / Implementation / Sales team.
Sushrut: That sounds very multi-tasking, demanding, and challenging. Can you share any recent projects or initiatives you’ve been involved in?
Gaurav: Sure! We were working manually to deploy the new builds to all these clients and it was being finished when almost the start of the next cycle of build deployments. I was concerned about this as more clients were being added constantly back in 2017-18. Hence, I and my team thought to start with small-scale automation using Powershell, batches, and jenkins to start a basic CI-CD pipeline. This ensured the ability to backup, deploy and roll back operations for application and database changes hand-in-hand at the same time for multiple clients. The idea was famous and even senior stakeholders were happy with increased efficiency. This allowed us to work on some more critical client issues that were being given to the development team previously to resolve.
Sushrut: That’s an amazing example of initiating transformation, Gaurav. What is your normal course of action to drive the DevOps culture in your company?
Gaurav: I didn’t keep the practice to my department only but I also provided help to other product deployment teams to follow the same practice by mentoring the application deployment automation. As a team leader when I first introduced this, I had to present it in practical ways to ensure the team’s trust first. I guess that first trust is what took us far altogether.
Sushrut: I am impressed with your collaborative nature and ideal leadership behavior. What do you think are the greatest challenges DevOps face these days?
Gaurav: The biggest challenge you have is to identify the best technology to use according to the nature of the product, type of infrastructure, and OS. Working on the microservices on various cloud platforms seamlessly is the other. Approaching creative ideas and implementing them would be one of the greatest challenges one faces, almost driving the new culture in a soiled organization. Additionally, every DevOps engineer today needs to
look in the mirror and ask themselves ‘What should I focus on learning? as there are more than 50 tools out there and all employers use various ones. This is indeed a big question at the same time the new revolutionary tools keep coming.
Sudhrut: Thank you for highlighting those important aspects. Before the closure, do you have any words to advise the new DevOps out there or the ones who are keen to be one?
Gaurav: I would say that DevOps needs to adapt learning daily and continuously think about how to improve, and keep practising on that – Just like CICD (Continuous Improvement and Continuous Delivery). To me, a successful DevOps is always prepared for change and improvements. To become a successful DevOps engineer one needs to excel in communication, evolve with cross-functional collaboration, and keep learning new tools to make lives easy.
Sushrut: Great insights! Thank you for sharing your expertise and advice with us today, this indeed will help the DevOps engineers who are in early careers and also the emerging leaders.
Gaurav: It’s been my pleasure, Sushrut. Thank you for this opportunity to speak to you.
In the End of Interview
The interview not only shared great insights but also discussed the challenges the DevOps engineers face today and exhibited the ideal leader’s work in this area by sharing his own experience. This interview highlights the importance of collaboration and innovation bringing change and ending rigid practices.
Wow, what an insightful article! As someone in the early stages of my DevOps career, Gaurav Desai’s perspective on the ideal day-to-day life of a team lead is gold. The emphasis on staying motivated to learn new things is so crucial in our fast-evolving field. It’s like a continuous journey of self-improvement, and Gaurav’s advice resonates deeply. I especially love the idea of becoming a master at a few core skills – it’s not about spreading yourself too thin but rather excelling in areas that truly matter. Kudos to Gaurav for sharing such valuable insights, truly inspiring for us DevOps enthusiasts!