Cloudy with a chance of DevSecOps...

First and foremost, apologies for the awful title - where bad puns are concerned, I simply cannot be stopped. Much like the Office for National Statistics when it comes to hiring new engineers for our very busy Cloud Division!

Today a new vacancy has launched, giving members of the public just two weeks to get themselves in contention to be one of our newest Senior Cloud DevSecOps Engineers.

But what is a Senior Cloud DevSecOps Engineer? Well I'm glad you asked - I backed one of ours into a corner and wouldn't let them carry on with their day until they answered my questions.

Thanks to Jenny Sadler for sharing these insights - read on to find out more!

What is your current role, and how long have you been with ONS?

DevSecOps Enginneer. I’ve been at ONS since September 2020.

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What was your background before joining?

My career background was social care. I had worked for 15 years in mental health and homeless services as a Support Worker. I completed a year MSc in Software Engineering in 2019/2020 at Cardiff University and started at ONS as a Graduate Software Engineer after I finished that course. I applied internally for the Senior DevSecOps role last year.

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What are your team like?

Brilliant. They’ve been supportive from the moment I started in terms of teaching me the ropes. They always put aside time to show me how to do things or let me learn through observing them. There is a wide range of knowledge and skills in the team so I’ve been able to learn different things from each team member. It’s a very collaborative team.

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How do your team fit into the wider ONS?

I work on the Ingest Service Team. We mainly develop automated solutions to enable the ingest of data from external suppliers into the ONS, or movement of data between on premise locations so that data engineers can access the data and work their magic before it gets published for the public. The automation of ingest solutions means we can get new data regularly without the need for any manual work.

What are you working on at the moment?

My team have been working on a big project in line with the ONS Cloud First Strategy which has involved changing our pipelines to write new data to cloud storage rather than to on premise storage, and migrating terabytes of existing data stored on premise to the cloud. I’m also working on several new ingest pipelines which also use AWS cloud services to transfer data from external suppliers.

What challenges can someone expect as a Senior Cloud DevSecOps Engineer?

Maybe not a challenge as such, but you have to be prepared for a fast paced working environment. DevOps is all about agility and making incremental changes quickly. Whilst automation is used as much as possible to enable this there will still be things that need quick reaction and manual remedy. Because your tasks will be spanning development, ops and security you also need to be prepared to be working on multiple projects at one time that are technically very different to one another, so you need to be able to make that switch sometimes multiple times a day.?

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What are the three things you spend the most time doing in your role?

1. Building new ingest solutions. This involves gathering requirements and then developing, testing and deploying the pipelines.
2. Maintaining and improving the Ingest Service, which involves monitoring and troubleshooting ingest issues and making adjustments to improve the service either to infrastructure or the pipelines.
3. Collaborating with my team. We put our heads together a lot to come up with solutions for new projects or improvements to existing projects.

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What’s been the most rewarding part of working at ONS for you so far?

It’s really rewarding being able to see new ingest solution projects through in their entirety from the early stages of requirement gathering, then developing and testing and finally deploying to production and knowing that you have enabled a new dataset to be delivered and published. Particularly so when you’ve developed a new pattern which can then be re-used for other new data ingests.

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What have you learned since joining ONS?

I’ve learnt such a wide range of skills. The technical skills I’ve learnt are mainly around Cloud computing (the AWS platform), deploying infrastructure through code (Terraform), using Concourse for automated deployment and using Nifi software for building ingest pipelines. All of which was brand new to me when I started the role. There is always something new to learn.

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What skills are the most important for a Cloud DevSecOps Engineer at ONS?

DevOps is a bridge between development (software engineering) and operations (code deployment) so depending on the level you join at, you will need some knowledge of code development, automated testing and continuous integration and deployment technologies. You will need understanding of security best practices and cyber security threats. Communication and collaboration skills are also important because you will be working on group projects all the time.

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Why should the person reading this apply?

There are opportunities to learn and work on a wide range of projects and modern technologies. You are encouraged to bring new ideas on ways to solve problems and you are fully supported to learn the skills you need if you don’t already have them. The progression opportunities at ONS are great, as is the flexible working!

What a great insight, thanks again to Jenny for sharing.

If this has piqued your interest, there's extensive further information here - as well as the very enticing APPLY button ??- and if you've got any questions please get in touch!

For hints and tips on putting together your application, have a look at this.