My Week showcases one of our expert’s work week – the highs and the challenges they are facing, and what the role actually consists of.

Today we take a look at the work week of Juuso Saranki from our Consultant team. Juuso has been at Zure for one year now as a Senior Consultant.

Juuso lives and works mainly from Mikkeli, so we took advantage and followed Juuso for one week in November when he was around at our Helsinki office. Let’s hear what the work week at Zure feels like from a more remote-working perspective!

What does your work week consist of?

I am currently working 50% with a development team and 50% on other smaller projects. In the development project I am a DevOps expert, bulding and testing automations. This week I have been mostly focused on policy-driven deployment.

In other projects I usually start with Landing Zones, Governance Frameworks and other high-level auditions or frameworks. Currently on my desk I have a hands-on AVD implementation for one of our clients as a PoC, and if it goes well, then I’ll have a bigger project on my hands.

This week I also held my about-monthly Microsoft training. This time it was a Microsoft Azure Immersion Workshop about Hybrid Cloud Solutions. In the workshop, I tried to give comprehensive overview on how companies could take advantage of cloud-based innovations when running on-premises workloads. I like to train and share my insigths, but mostly I just like to be around people – hence I try to host at least once a month a training.

What has been most challenging this week?

The overall DevOps Engineer work in my current project has been super interesting. Every day there is a new challenge waiting to be troubleshooted. Permissions for various scopes are usually one tricky area, when playing with templates and trying to figure out what are the minimum permissions to make things work. Another challenge this week was with Logic Apps and trying to find the best way to automate the CI/CD pipelines.

What internal stuff do you have?

One of my main internal responsibilities currently is the driving of our CAF model and formulate a Zure-model on how we approach it. There are many ways how to drive CAF, but we want to highlight the areas we feel most important based on our experiences.

As an internal side hustle, we also develop our PlatformOps model with our DevOps nerds, like Okko Oulasvirta, Jukka Koskelin, Jakub Nørløv Iwanczuk and Pasi Huuhka. For me learning from these gurus have been an amazing opportunity. From our experience PlatformOps is still a fast developing area on process-wise and there are still many things that can be finetuned on the process. We meet with our DevOps folks every Friday.

Another weekly team meeting is our Consultant team meeting every Monday. We check how everyone is doing, as we might be working all over the place with different customers. I’m happy I can get easily help from such experienced colleagues if needed.

Best things lately?

I’m always super happy when I get to visit our Helsinki office. I try to be here about 2-3 times per month to chat with people face to face. All work-related stuff from debugging to meetings works well from home too, but it’s the sharing with people I’m not working with in projects that I miss the most after moving back to my original home town.

Of course work-wise resolving challenges gives me huge kicks – like this week I got the AVD templates working for a customer, after banging my head against a wall for some time. Also our internal PlatformsOps development is a nice challenge: how to fine-tune the processes for new workloads far as possible, but also what to do with the existing resources too, so that the entity as a whole can be controlled?