Hello, I am David 👋🏻 - Today I'm going to give you an in-depth look at my week as a Senior AWS Cloud Engineer at globaldatanet. Right now I am working on 2 customer projects which means more structuring of my week but also giving me the possibility to work with a diversified range of different tools and tasks. Usually, roughly one day of my week is dedicated to a customer working in the e-commerce industry, the other days are assigned to another customer, a big insurance company. Let’s dive right in! 🤿.

My week 🗓

I usually start the day with a cup of coffee. At the same time, I first check Slack and Teams to see what news there has been in the past few days. I also scan Twitter and AWS Blog Post for exciting new features for social media and our customers.

Monday

On Mondays, before the day really gets going, I take the time to plan the whole week. That means I first get an overview of the upcoming tasks for this week, which user stories were completed last week and which are coming up this week.
Typically the day starts with a daily team meeting with the customer, in which the tasks for the day are briefly defined, and the previous week is compactly reviewed as well. This Monday I primarily did some troubleshooting for Athena Partitions, fixing the lambda to automatically create new partitions for budget report dashboards every month. For the same customer, I also spend some time building a tool to detect the reason for the cost explosion. For example, showing that one Fargate was corrupted and was starting to create/ delete network interfaces 400 times higher than usual each day. As part of my day, I also worked on a cost optimization task, decoding Alexa Skills mp3s (320kbit to 128kbits) on Amazon S3, as well as adjusting the max-age for S3 objects. As a highlight this Monday we also had a call with AWS directly to present our previously implemented solutions for our current customer and discuss potential new opportunities.

Tuesday

Business as usual Tuesday also started with the daily at 9. Followed up by a call with the technical manager to discuss the user stories in more detail. What have I been working on this Tuesday? Mainly doing the automation for the customer internal web application firewall, as well as scanning the whole organization for non-compliant resources, cleaning up & fixing those resources in accordance with Config cleanup rules.

Wednesday

As you already know how my day starts I will jump right into my tasks on Wednesday. Besides the Config cleanup rules which I was still working on, I also fixed the automation for ConfigAggregators as the aggregators were not processed properly when moving from one account to another organizational unit. Currently, I am also preparing an AWS blog post, as well as we are discussing further details about the customer internal web application firewall, which means today was more of a mix between working on my customer projects and some planning meetings. Besides that, I also reached out to the diagrams.net developers to get more information on the API for the open-source orgtool extension.

Thursday

On Thursday I was mainly creating a tool to automatically create IAM users, tags, and groups to JSON and CSV. Additionally, I also added a feature in the internal cost detection explosion tool to export CSV files. To make sure previously encountered issues can be overcome with ease in the future, I also created a Cleanup/ Closing Account Runbook for the customer.

Friday

On Friday mornings we have our weekly globaldatanet meeting. In 30 minutes the team can exchange information about the different tasks within the week. It's always a good opportunity to stay up to date with what my colleagues are currently working on, even if you are not working on the same project. Mainly for the day, I was still working on the creation of the tool for IAM and also did spend some time reviewing the code and features developed by a colleague for a previous customer project. Currently, we are working on the security competency from AWS, so we dedicated some time on Friday to prepare for the requirements and the external audit.
As for every Friday, our team ends the week with our 🦾 Tech & Beer 🍺. This week Anton shared his journey on how to add custom checks to checkov. Always a highlight and a nice way of ending the week. Unfortunately, right now office time is rare otherwise the Tech & Beer usually is a good starting point for some further drinking and spending some time with the team after work.

Highlight of the month 🚀

For me, it was the possibility to show the AWS Team the work we have done for customer A throughout the last year. Wrapping up our developed services like dashboards and an Account Factory.

Most important Tools and Service used this week 🛠

{
      "week": [
            {
                  "Id": "16",
                  "AWS-Services": [
                    "AWS CloudFormation",
                    "AWS CloudTrail",
                    "AWS Config",
                    "Amazon CloudFront",
                    "AWS Cost Explorer",
                    "AWS Lambda",
                    "AWS Key Management Service",
                    "Amazon Athena"
                  ],
                  "Languages": [
                    "Python",
                    "nodejs",
                  ],
                  "Tools": [
                    {
                        "name": "ORGTOOL",
                        "github": "https://github.com/daknhh/aws-orgtool"

                    },
                    {
                        "name": "cfn-python-lint",
                        "github": "https://github.com/aws-cloudformation/cfn-python-lint"

                    },
                    {
                        "name": "cfn-diagram",
                        "github": "https://github.com/mhlabs/cfn-diagram"

                    },
                    {
                        "name": "Taskfile",
                        "github": "https://github.com/Wildhoney/Taskfile"

                    }
                  ],

            }
      ]
}

Bottom line ❤️

At globaldatanet, I can work with colleagues but also spend time with friends. Whether it's the lunch break together, a drink (or a few ;)) after work, or just a quick chat in between. Throughout my different projects, I have the possibility to work with an exciting tech stack in different industries while using the cutting edge technologies, especially related to AWS Services. I like the flexibility and the start-up feeling that globaldatanet retained, meaning flat hierarchies, quick decisions and the possibility to participate in a lot of cool things and internal decisions.