Changing Gears — Shifting from being a DBA to a Cloud-Native Architect

For a long time, I wanted to share my story with everyone. So finally, I got some time to jot down to specifically talk about how to build a career in Cloud-native technologies?

I have spent over a decade working in IT and Technology companies. Worked for large enterprises — Telco, Banks, and Products.

In 2007, when I was doing my engineering course, I got the offer from Accenture to join them as an Associate. In 2008, I finished college with excitement to join Accenture.

I worked in a traditional Infrastructure team for more than a decade and then moved to DevOps as a career. The switch was technically not hard, but a few things to keep in mind so that it is easy from the organization's perspective.

Find a mentor who is into the new skills and use your existing network to get the job. Often, it is hard to prove that you can take up the new skill in a new company, so sticking with an existing project or company is usually easy.
Work on improving trust and showing curiosity all the time. It helps your manager to take more risks in your career change.
Self-learning: Be a continuous learner and try to mix skills in your existing role.
Self-Branding: If you want to do Y and always brand yourself as X, it won’t help. Change your resume, LinkedIn profile and start promoting yourself in the newer areas. Join meetups, try to write about the things you want to do, and improve your network. The next opportunity mostly comes from your soft skills rather than your technical skills.

Start of the Career

In 2007, when I was doing my engineering course, I got the offer from Accenture to join them as an Associate. In 2008, I finished college with excitement to join Accenture.

Initially, for six months, learning was slow due to the global recession and not having projects to work on. I continued to explore databases and found some excellent mentors who taught me very well. It went well, and I got to work in a very large Telco environment, setting up things from scratch, learning from senior DBAs, and awesome managers who believed in me. Fast-forward, this went really well, and I got the opportunity to taste WFH for a couple of years in 2011–12.

I enjoyed every day doing performance tuning, mentoring developers on how to write performant queries, doing code reviews, automating mundane tasks, evaluating, and improving database performance. This was the most productive time of my life.

Standing on the Shoulders of the Giants

In the mid of 2012, I moved to Melbourne, sitting closely with the Client Operations team and senior members of my own team. I got guidance from seniors in doing deep analysis and my work started getting attention. A lot of people across the organization engaged me for deep troubleshooting, planning, long term performance improvements. This allowed me to work on various types of applications and tech stacks such as billing systems, CRM, Integration layers, ETLs, design of disaster recovery sites, and large-scale data processing pipelines. During the course, I regularly interacted with the star DBAs and database engineers across the world through internal and external engagements and sessions.

I kept my interest open to all types of technologies and skills and tried to mix them to improve my productivity of myself, increase my knowledge, and reduce the boredom of remaining in the same skill for a long time. Just to give an example, I used to create automation and self-service in PHP/Shell, used language R to do analysis and create great visuals of performance problems; used Splunk to create capacity reports with future predictions using its own ML models. I also started putting my deep knowledge in Oracle and turned that into tooling and shared it with other fellow teams. This freed up my time to do higher-level functions and take up more challenging tasks.

Standing on the shoulders of the giant is the quickest way to upskill yourselves.

Shifting to Cloud and Kubernetes

I knew that the DBA skills would soon be automated with the growing Cloud initiatives, and most of the knowledge was automated by the product and through tooling itself. I started looking for a change and at that time in 2018, luckily, I got an opportunity to design a Microservices platform for a logistics and warehouse system. However, this also required me to use my existing DBA skills to design a DB2 cluster. I could not say no to this because I was getting a mix of legacy and next-generation systems.

I barely heard of Kubernetes at that time. Furthermore, I tried the upstream Kubernetes installation on some VMs in AWS and started exploring the Kubernetes groups and forums for all my problems in the first week. By the end of the week, I started finding groups and people who were doing really well. I would like to thank the Kubernetes community for being such a warm and open place. Any newbie can actually start talking to more experienced folks on their forums and allow you to access all the information needed for you to solve the problems.

I participated in their community meetings and had access to their groups, where I got a vast amount of first-hand information and knowledge.

In March 2018, I volunteered for Container Camp Australia where I met Kubernetes experts from various organizations like Google, Heptio, SUSE, AWS, iflix, ARM, etc, and got a chance to personally talk to Dave Cheney. He is the author of Contour — Ingress controller for Kubernetes. It was a very inspiring few minutes that made a lasting impact on me.

Since then, I have explored various cloud-native technologies and started following all the conferences and meetups. These platforms allowed me to network with others and learn from them.

In 2020, I started looking for a job in India, and naturally, I was inclined towards cloud-native tech. I shortlisted the core contributors of cloud-native projects from India such as InfraCloud, Platform 9, Mayadata etc, who had been doing really well in this space. I got to know about Vishal from the Container Camp talks, who is the CTO of InfraCloud. I reached out to him on LinkedIn and had a conversation about what they were doing and in the same week, they offered me a Cloud-Native Solution Architect role at InfraCloud. Furthermore, I was really impressed by Vishal and his thinking and ability to innovate in the cloud-native industry.

InfraCloud

There are a few reasons, why I joined InfraCloud:

Wanted to work in a fast-growing startup that are innovators and thought leaders.
Clients were product companies designing something cool using cloud-native tech or Kubernetes-related product itself.
Remote, always improving, and risk-taking.
Great culture — you can read more about it on their blog.

All of the above were true, and I worked closely with Vishal on various initiatives — be it growing the organization or solving complex technical problems.

I have provided consulting to various small to large organizations in the first year and also participated in various internal initiatives to grow the company. I worked closely with the HR team, talent acquisition, marketing, and potential leads.

At InfraCloud, I spent 1.5 years grooming myself into cloud-native tech, technical leadership, technical writing, and mentoring. I highly recommend it for someone who is trying to grow themselves in these skills.

Lummo (formerly BukuKas & Tokko)

<a href="https://medium.com/media/ef1e00e5087b19d72de418b77d55f880/href">https://medium.com/media/ef1e00e5087b19d72de418b77d55f880/href</a>

At the end of 2021, I was looking for Internet-scale businesses to see the concerns that you don’t typically see in smaller setups. On this journey, I got to know about Lummo, a fast-growing Indonesian market with global aspirations, with a vision with which I can relate myself. I joined them as a Principal Software Engineer in the Platform engineering team. We are building the platform to help SEA entrepreneurs digitize, sell and grow their products and services. We are growing and expanding our teams and working on the latest tech.

We are hiring!

If you are interested in learning more about us, feel free to book a time with me.

Cloud Native Weekly — https://anjulsahu.substack.com

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Shifting from Traditional Infra to Cloud Native Role was originally published in FAUN Publication on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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