It’s 6:30 and I’m getting into the car to head to Distrito Telefónica in Madrid, my workplace. It’s an incredible place, full of biodiversity and where you can breathe something special. It’s like a small city where magic happens every day.
I usually arrive at the office at 7:10. I work in the West 1 building, which is one of the 4 tallest buildings we have in the Telefonica District. I go to the 6th floor, specifically where Telefónica Tech’s brand new Digital Operations Center (DOC) is located. Although it’s not my official start time until 8:00, I like to arrive early, as apart from avoiding traffic jams, I have those 45 minutes of calm that allow me to concentrate to put my mail in order or do something that requires concentration, and attend to whatever the day has in store for me calmly. I love working in this location of the complex, because apart from having a very friendly and modern environment, we have incredible views of the outside from this height.
It’s 8:00 a.m. and when the whole team is here, we go for a coffee to get the morning off to a good start. Usually my whole team (Public Clouds) and the DevOps/SRE and K8S team, who report to the same management, go together. It’s a time to chat in a relaxed way, although we also take the opportunity to talk about work issues. The truth is that I am very lucky with the people that surround me in my day-to-day work, as we all have a very good working atmosphere. Back at our work stations, we started the day’s work. E-mails, meetings, ‘let’s look at this incident that has arrived’, customer visits and more surprises that the day brings…
In my team we operate the Public Clouds service, supporting Azure and Oracle Cloud (OCI) platforms for the Large Customer segment. We provide lifecycle support (after the initial provisioning), attending to any request or incident that our customers demand. Our service is 24×7.
My work tools
We work in a very technological environment and surrounded by many professionals. Above all, we use the Microsoft 365 suite (Outlook, Teams, Excel…etc.) for the office automation part, ServiceNow for the ticketing part (Incidents and customer requests), and then other more specific tools for the work we do in my department:
- Terraform: This is an IaC (Infrastructure as code) tool. We use it to create new infrastructure on the cloud platform. It also serves as a backup of infrastructure elements. As support, we use GitHub, where we store all the code generated by Terraform.
- Azure CLI and OCI CLI: These are the CLIs (Command Line Interface) of the cloud platforms we manage. To put it at a low level, this would be an ‘MS-DOS’ of the clouds from which we launch commands to manage the platform, create virtual machines, register users, delete a backup or any other operation that can be performed on the platform’s services.
- Azure Portal and Oracle Cloud Portal: With them you can do the same as with the CLI but in web format and ‘at the click of a mouse’ (much more user-friendly and intuitive). This is the tool we use the most.
- Microsoft Partner Center: This is a Microsoft web tool from which we have access to the Microsoft services that our customers have contracted, and from which we can provision new services or manage the cancellation of current ones, as well as access their management consoles (in our case, the Azure Portal, but it is also valid for M365).
- Telefónica Tech Cloud Portal: This tool is probably familiar to you if you are a customer as it is the website you use to manage your cloud services contracted with Telefónica. We also use a module of this tool (ADM) for plant and inventory control. As you can see, we like to be so close to the customer that we even share tools.
We also have two weekly checkpoint meetings in the team, to see the pending tickets and the projects we have in flight. In these meetings we check if there is any risk in any of the projects or any activity that has been blocked for some reason. For the control and monitoring of the projects we use the Microsoft Planner tool, which is part of the Microsoft 365 suite.
Likewise, on one of the days we go to the office, we take advantage of the opportunity to hold a Management Meeting, in which the Tech Leads from the Technical Centres share all the relevant points of the week with the Service Manager and the Team Leads.
Our hybrid work model
At Telefónica we have a hybrid working model, so there are days when we work from home. The experience may not be as exciting as the one described here, but it does save you the traffic and the early morning commute, which is not bad either. Throughout these days, I enjoy a very special company, Mambo, who is also waiting for me on my way back from the office when I have to go. Without a doubt, the best moment of the day is to be able to be at home and enjoy it.
