Cristian Nicoara

Leading my current team is both a privilege and an honor; it is a privilege because solving problems and improving becomes easier with the awesome, skilled colleagues, I have and it is an honor because every member of the team is absolutely an incredible individual.

My team's mission is to help and support Visma's services and companies to adopt modern engineering practices and cloud technologies. Our guidance depends on the team's context, its challenges and objectives (including business objectives). To a large extend we offer engineering coaching in the following areas:

• Public cloud architecture
• Continuous delivery and DevOps
• Software architecture
• Technical debt management
• APIs
• Testing Capabilities
• Business continuity
• Performance planning
• Migrations from traditional datacenters to the cloud

We achieve our mission by using a toolbox of assessments or checklists meant to facilitate discovery of risks and improvements for all the above mentioned areas. Most important, by using the checklists, teams can create an environment for understanding the current status of their service and build an improved version of it.

The most significant and valuable experience, in which I played a central and leading role, was to define a new vision of how to fulfill our mission. Our goal is to automate as much as possible the identification of cloud infrastructure and development risks for Visma teams. Doing so will help teams have actionable guidance at their fingertips. Our assessments will then focus more on the overall architecture, future plans and strategies.

As team lead, I have multiple important goals:

• Create an environment of trust and psychological safety where team members are encouraged to express their opinions and help the team achieve its mission.
• Invite and engage team members to participate into creating our mission and vision. If team members are engaged to build the team's mission and vision, they will also be motivated to make it happen.
• Help team to focus on achieving our goals, avoid huge cognitive load and create clarity in planning within and outside the team.
• Pay attention to team members needs, listen and coach them (if needed) into continuously improving themselves.
• Be clear about the expected outcome of our tasks and the projects we execute so that team members can organize themselves (avoid micro-management)

Most relevant frequent activities:

• Organizing, running and leading the AWS Sharing Experience Forum; this forum has an average participation rate of 50 people each month. The goal of the forum is to create an environment in which Visma employees share their experiences, projects and stories to help others learn and embrace AWS technologies.
• Weekly team activities meant to enable communication, collaboration and brainstorming; ex: 1 to 1s and working hours with entire team.
• Ad-Hoc architecture discussions with various teams that are in need of a sparing partner.
• Working with AWS Technical Account Management teams to deliver a comprehensive training program with approximately 300 people trained on the cloud.

In the current environment, my biggest challenge is to say NO. This is maybe because I am too agreeable and also because some of the ideas are very good and it is hard to say no. Being too agreeable is not a good predictor for success in business. Saying YES to everything is a recipe for disaster because a team can easily lose focus.

I navigate this challenge by creating clarity on our mission, goals and priorities.

This position represented a shift in my career because I moved from a daily hands-on position, where my work had impact mainly on my team, to a position where I had less hands-on work and much more interaction with many teams across Visma. As a result, the impact of my work has shifted to over 100 Visma teams and their corresponding services/apps.

The mission was to help and support Visma's teams and companies to adopt modern engineering practices. The same mission as for my current position; also the same areas of offering assistance as for my current position: Public cloud architecture, Continuous delivery and DevOps, Software architecture, Technical debt management, APIs, Testing Capabilities, Business continuity and Performance management. However, having worked with the tools and understood the benefits and challenges, it becomes clear that the methods used to achieve our mission could be greatly enhanced.

Most valuable learnings:

• Understand the mission of our team and the efficiency of our existing tools in achieving our mission.
• Customer centric attitude. To offer the best possible assistance, I learned how to listen, understand and ask relevant questions to determine team's needs, challenges and objectives.
• Learning from and providing feedback to a huge diversity of technical solutions and cloud architectures.

Most relevant day to day activities:

• Conduct more than 100 assessment reviews with teams across Visma.
• Continuously developing our tool-box and incorporate the most. modern capabilities and technologies to help Visma teams keep their services future-proof.
• Helping and assisting more than 30 Visma services to migrate their services from traditional datacenters to the cloud.
• Working with AWS Technical Account Management team to implement different AWS programs across Visma.

During this period, I was responsible for the infrastructure of a SaaS application, in a team of approximately 16 people. Team's culture was adapting to DevOps and I represented the Ops part initially. Step by step, operational knowledge and experience was shared throughout the team.

The most significant experience I had was successfully migrating our SaaS application from a traditional data center to the cloud (AWS). I was responsible with creating the overall migration strategy, cloud infrastructure implementation and coordination with the Visma ecosystem of services consuming our APIs. The project took around 18 months and it was a beautiful project due to its complexity and the amount of learnings we had to acquire to make it happen. The migration to AWS was successful and a new journey started for me and my team: adopting more cloud native technologies and using cloud to its full potential.

Most meaningful and valuable learnings:

• Deep understanding of handling migration projects from traditional data-center to the cloud
• How to use cloud technologies to implement continuous delivery and live deploy capabilities
• How to work in development team as the infrastructure responsible and how to use the DevOps principles of Collaboration, Automation, Constant Improvement and Data-based decision making to improve the service

Most relevant technologies I used to get my hands dirty on a day-to-day basis:

• terraform to describe the infrastructure; implemented reusable modules aggregated in a layered approach to allow different parts of the infrastructure to be changed independently.
• cloud native technologies like the Application Load Balancer, Elastic Container Service, AWS Lambda and AWS CloudWatch
• Jenkins and scripting (mainly bash and python) to help transition towards the cloud
• RDS Aurora, AWS S3 and AWS EFS to provide relational database support and storage capabilities
• AWS CloudWatch, AppDynamics, Grafana and Graphite for monitoring purposes. Created an interesting monitoring architecture meant to lower cost per metric using Graphite and Grafana.

This role is a continuation of the previous role with similar technologies and activities. The difference is that over this period of time, I only focused on 3 or 4 specific SaaS applications and their corresponding development teams.

Therefore, my mission is the same as for my previous role but more focused on specific applications.

Most meaningful experience was about designing and implementing an automated provisioning and live deploy solution in a traditional data-center (VMware). Based on chef (configuration management tool) for automated provisioning and on open-source load balancer technologies for making live deploy possible.

Additional important learnings:

• Better understanding of the importance of collaboration between Ops and Development.
• Importance of providing early ops/infrastructure feedback in the development process.
• Importance of involving dev team people in incident resolution and root cause analysis.
• How to create a fully automated solution for provisioning virtual machines, managing configuration management and enabling live deploy.

Soon after my team and I implemented the automated solution for provisioning, configuration management and live deployment, I started the journey of transitioning to the cloud.

This position represents a big shift in my work life because I moved from an Internet Service Provider to a Software Development company.

My team's mission was to provide support to multiple development teams through the creation and operation of multiple development environments, including production environments. This was back in the days where ops and dev were different teams or organizations ("It works on my computer" old days).

Most meaningful experience was about making the research and implementation for splitting and scaling a service hosted on single virtual machine - single point of failure service serving more than 1k customers. Project took about two months and one whole night at office for full implementation. The implemented scalable solutions still runs today supporting more than 5k customers.

Most valuable learnings:

• Understand dynamics between ops and dev.
• Understand importance of offering quality hosted services for development teams.
• Being 100% customer driven - correlated with the points below
• Design for high availability and scalability
• Handling production incidents in a 24/7 configuration with response times below 10 minutes.
• Importance of monitoring and observability capabilities; worst-case scenario is when clients communicate to support that there is an incident in progress.

Most relevant technologies I used to get my hands dirty on a day-to-day basis:

• Troubleshooting small to major events/incidents into our environments
• Deploy and maintain mysql, apache, glassfish servers
• Deploy fail-over and load-balancing solutions using heartbeat, corosync and pacemaker
• Deploy dynamic storage solutions using: iscsi, lvm, mdadm
• Build and deploy nagios/nrpe scripts in bash and/or perl for active/passive monitoring
• Configuration management using chef and puppet
• Testing/stress testing and profiling applications using: jmeter, SoapUI, graphite
• Build and deploy cluster environments under virtual VMware system.

This position represents the beginning of my career and the first real job. I started this job in my 4th year of attending the Computer Science University.

My initial role was to offer support to customers with their modem Internet connections and to my colleagues with the installation of new customers. Step by step, I moved to a more complex network administrator and engineer position where my experience in networking and Linux administration kept growing.

Most valuable learnings:

• Low level networking knowledge that is now (2022) nicely hidden under layers "making it easy for customers"
• Basic understanding of services like: dhcp, dns, mail, file sharing
• Using Linux operating systems to provide scalable services for internet service provider

Here are some of the technologies I used getting my hands dirty on a daily basis and some of the main activities:

• Cisco equipment configured at the core, distribution and access leves
• Configure and maintain linux servers that provide: dhcp, tftp, dns, mail, samba, qos , routing
• Developed software applications for customer management, equipments and ticketing (using perl, php, C++ and mysql)
• Building and maintaining internal site: monitoring tools using, customers and equipment management tools, web-services (SOAP) for automatic configuration of equipment.
• Configuring and trouble-shouting various network equipments: Cisco Layer 3 equipment (Cisco 2960,3560, 7600 series), Huawei, ZTE, CTS
• Configuring and trouble-shouting a metropolitan area network: multiple vlans, VPN tunnels: MPLS, EoMPLS and routing protocols: OSPF, BGP
• Configuring linux servers: quaga server for bgp connections, vpn servers using openvpn or openswan, mail servers using postfix

Looking back, it was a great job starting my career with because it created a strong foundation for building new skills.