150 hours at the Maximus Cloud Engineering internship have flown by. I’ve been bombarded with information which has been a great learning experience. I feel like I have a better grasp on what a Cloud Engineer actually does and it’s not all building cloud infrastructure. Much of what we are doing is maintaining existing cloud infrastructure like patching servers and completing various IT tasks.
I’ve been introduced to many different projects that Maximus works on. One project I’ve been able to work on is so big that they have separated the patching from the rest of Maximus corporate patching. Instead of creating baselines based on CVEs, a golden AMI is edited and pushed to each account in the project.
I had to stand up and speak with the mentors and director about the amount of shadowing that was taking place. I took a big salary hit to be at this internship so if I’m not learning I’m not getting paid. There were some times the mentors would schedule a meeting then not show up or reschedule which was not okay. After speaking to everyone, the experience really changed. The mentors connected me with their teams to pull me in any time they had anything interesting to work on. I went from twittling my thumbs to being busy 4-5 hours a day.
One of the main things I’ve taken away from shadowing is the amount of collaboration that takes place on each team. I come from a workplace where one person has to do 90% of the work on each project, wearing many different hats. The teams at Maximus are massive and each task is delegated out. Things get done much faster even though the projects are so much more complex and intricate. All of this is thanks to collaboration and communication.
As far as different technologies go, I’ve been inundated with the number of applications I’ve been introduced to. Recently, I’ve been introduced to Git for updating Golden AMIs in order to patch non-prod accounts. First, the golden AMI is updated for the most recent update, only in the non-prod environments. After that, we have to navigate to the correct environment in the appropriate account. In the service catalog, the golden AMI has to be pushed to each instance then shared with the other non-prod environments. Production environments are the live websites and applications that Maximus provides so we absolutely cannot mess with those in business hours.
Last week I spun up an application load balancer and have another CR to decommission a VM in Azure. I’m excited to get some experience in Azure so I can have a more robust cloud background. The big three cloud vendors basically offer the same services with a different syntax. The VM was spun up in the wrong environment so it is not needed. There was already a replacement VM spun up in the correct environment so we didn’t have to meet with CAB… they approved it without a meeting. I have this work scheduled but I have not been able to complete it. The disk needs to be cleansed, deleted, then the VM can be decommissioned. I believe the disk needs to be cleansed before it is deleted for cybersecurity reasons… even if the disk is