A team asks for a cloud project. Hours later it exists.
Eighteen months embedded with Groupon's platform team, through TrustSoft. The team operated the shared foundation across AWS and Google Cloud.
In brief
- Problem
A queue for cloud projects
Development teams waited days for new cloud projects, with manual setup handled by a small platform team.
- My contribution
Self-service provisioning
Through TrustSoft, I automated Google Cloud project provisioning and improved the developer tools Groupon's teams already used.
- Result
Automated project creation
Google Cloud project creation moved from manual ticketing to automated provisioning in hours.
Results
- Days → hours
- Google Cloud project provisioning moved from days of manual ticketing to automated creation in hours.
- Existing platform
- Groupon's platform team ran the shared AWS and Google Cloud foundation. I operated and maintained it with them.
- Developer tooling
- I improved internal tools and demoed changes to the teams using them. I also supported deployments on the shared platform.
The problem
Groupon's development teams needed new cloud projects constantly, requiring deployment space with the right permissions, networking, and guardrails already in place. Each one was set up by hand: days of waiting on a small platform team, and no two projects came out quite the same.
At that scale a queue for cloud projects is a queue for everything downstream of them.
Whose part is whose
I was also the person those teams came to when a deployment would not go through: support, not just tooling.
Technical detail
- Request
- New Google Cloud project
- My implementation
- Python automation
- Terraform templates
- Result
- Project provisioned in hours
Platform context and technical details
What existed already
A serious platform: an enterprise landing zone (the shared foundation every team's cloud sits on) across AWS and Google Cloud, run as Terraform and Terragrunt at enterprise scale, plus a set of internal developer tools the teams already relied on.
It was the second time I had walked into a many-teams, one-foundation problem. The first was TrustSoft, where I had built the foundation myself.
What did not go well
- Automating project creation removed one queue and exposed the next: I stayed the person teams came to when a deployment would not go through. Self-service moved the bottleneck; it did not delete it.
- Through TrustSoft, I automated project creation within Groupon's existing platform processes. Provisioning became faster, while the surrounding process stayed the same. Improving that process would have required a broader project with the platform team.
What it taught me
- The next thing to automate is the answer to the question teams ask most, not the thing that is most interesting to build.
- Demo it to the people who will use it, in their words, before you call it done. The demos changed what I built more than the specification did.
What happened next
Where it went
I demoed and presented what we built directly to Groupon's teams, and worked with their engineers on the deployment practices that went with it.
What it left me with
Let's talk about what you are building.
I'm not taking freelance work. Happy to talk about Glow, automation ideas, or a product engineering opportunity.
The hello is written. The rest is yours.
hozaksebastian@gmail.com
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