Day in the life of AWS ProServe Consultant - DevOps Consultant: Govindhi Venkatachalapathy

1. What is your title, and which AWS team do you belong to?

DevOps Consultant, AWS Professional Services (ProServe) Business Development and Strategic Industries (BDSI)

2. Tell us about yourself

I moved to the US from India in April 2005. I am the first female engineer in my family and very early in my career, the opportunity to work for Lucent Technologies-Bell Labs in Nuremberg, Germany, jumpstarted my interest in this field. From then on, I have worked with telecom giants and network industries.?Throughout my professional life, I have taken on different roles such as developer, test automation engineer, project manager, and DevOps lead. I am a huge fan of Python and I love programming. My passion is automation and I enjoy developing tools and test framework to help increase productivity of developers and testers.?

On a more personal note, I love gardening and enjoy morning hikes and walks. I like to travel with my family and friends. In my free time, I also like to watch Indian movies.

3. Tell us about your role at AWS

AWS Professional Services DevOps is a Global Delivery Specialization designed to accelerate our customers' efforts to deliver applications and services at high velocity through the use of cloud computing with AWS. DevOps is the combination of cultural philosophies, practices, and tools that increases an organization’s ability to deliver applications and services at high velocity, evolving and improving products at a faster pace.

As a Professional Services DevOps consultant, I work with customers more closely every day. I work backwards with the customer to understand their requirements and challenges, then help them find the solutions that will help achieve their business goals. I also get the opportunity to directly influence the roadmaps of customers. ?

In my previous customer engagements, I was instrumental in bringing the DevOps culture to their engineering team and helped them adapt to the DevSecOps process. ?In this process, I designed and developed a self-service CI/CD pipeline framework so that developers themselves can onboard the CI/CD pipeline.

Having used both AWS DevOps tools like CodeBuild and CodePipeline and other CI/CD infrastructure tools like Jenkins, Bitbucket etc., I have developed python-based framework using AWS Data Science SDK and SageMaker Processing Job to automatically deploy the Jupiter notebooks to AWS Platform. This helps the Data Scientists deploy their ETL based notebooks to AWS Platform in much simpler steps. In my other customer engagement, I have architected a modern, serverless architecture using AWS Step Functions and Systems Manager to efficiently launch ephemeral EC2 instances to execute Robotic Process Automation scripts. I also develop Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to deploy AWS Services using Cloud Formation, CDK and Terraform.?

This role has never felt monotonous - with each customer engagement, I get a different experience, gain rich technical experience, and improve on my interpersonal skills such as communication and leadership.?I also essentially get to work within different industries, understand how their unique challenges translate into the DevOps space, all of which helps to broaden my knowledge and experience.?

Another interesting part of this role is the opportunity to share my knowledge with similar and wider communities by publishing re-usable artifacts in-house and AWS Github.?

4. What does a typical day look like for you?

I like start my day off early so I can also wrap it up early in order to spend my evenings with my family and do gardening. ?Generally, my day starts with a daily standup followed by a series of meetings with customers and internal team members. Sometimes I may be working on multiple projects and need to divide my time among the projects.

During the initial phase of any given project, the customer meetings mainly target on understanding their requirements, current challenges, and expected business goals. Once the requirements are clear, I work independently or with other team members for design and architecture.?

I collaborate with my other team members for any suggestions or questions and conduct internal reviews with the team members. In between meetings, I do research on the AWS services that are required for the projects and dive deep through the AWS blogs for best practices and guidance. I also take this time to work on proof of concepts, development, and implementation.?

I also intentionally set aside some time during the day for my personal growth - either by attending trainings on technical and interpersonal skills or prepare for AWS certifications. ?I usually end my work day by thinking about the creation of reusable artifacts from the learnings obtained from customer engagement and work on them. ?

AWS provides a lot of yoga or meditation sessions and, if time permits, I will join them in between meetings and have seen an increase in productivity afterwards. ?At AWS, it is always Day 1 and every day has something new to teach me.?

5.What do you like most about working for AWS? Did you have any inspiring moments?

People, People, People! The managers and peer consultants?constantly help and support you in achieving your goals. At AWS, I get a lot of opportunities to learn, grow, and share to be successful in my domain.?Customer engagements, delighting my customers with the work I have done always inspires me.

6. What is your favorite Leadership Principle, and why?

Customer Obsession is my favorite Leadership Principle as it leads to the rest of the principles. When you are customer obsessed, you take ownership of your work. You will find ways to invent and simplify to make your customers’ lives simpler and better. You will think big and always insist on the highest standards on behalf of your customers. You dive deep to understand their challenges, implement them quickly (bias for action) to earn their trust and deliver results – all of which has a direct influence on your customer’s business goal.?

If you would like to learn more about successful projects and what it's like as a woman leader within AWS, please join our upcoming Virtual Lounge on August 10th at 2pm PST and RSVP here https://womenleadersinaws.splashthat.com