STARR Detailed Flashcards
Give me an example of a success, something went well
Situation: When the OEM system had to be taken down for maintenance, they needed a way to revert back to cron monitoring scripts
Task: Come up with an automation that could toggle cron scripts on/off by the OEM team cross
Action: worked with AMS to determine what their best practices were, skilled up in systems manager, developed automation document, worked with our landing zone team, and AMS to deliver a solution.
Result: The OEM team could turn on/off cron monitoring across the estate to enable monitoring during an OEM outage.
What did I learn: It was a good example of teamwork, reaching out to the right groups, communication.
Give me an example of Team work
Situation: Company wanted to investigate Oracle C@C as an option
Task:We had to test the C@C POC environment to ensure that the service worked as expected
Action: We developed a python tool to test the Oracle API.
Result: We discovered several issues with the Oracle APIs that led to changes in the product.
What did I learn:. A lot technically, also knowing when to step back and perform a team member role as it was another leads project.
Give me an example of a Leadership
Situation: We required a cross-region replication strategy for HVR
Task: Initially to work with architects plan and perform POC for cross-region architecture
Action: Determined that the existing plan was too complicated, involved multiple HUBs a major version upgrade and technology that hadn’t been approved by the storage architects. I came up with new simplified architecture got the vendors sign-off.
Result: Completed POC, design was streamlined, we could hand off the builds to the delivery team.
What did I learn: That I enjoyed architecting. How to simplify the design process. Better to get delivery team involved earlier if possible.
Give me an example of a Decision making
Situation: Lots of older HVR builds running at different cloudformation template versions
Task: Find a way to bring all environments to a standard version
Action: Spend some time determining if we could somehow move existing resources into a standard cloud formation template. Decided that the best strategy was to build new environments and then migrate the data.
Result: We had a repeatable process that could be handed over. All the environments were migrated to the new builds and everything was standard moving forwards.
What did you learn: A good reminder to let go of initial ideas, don’t be precious. Ended up much easier to handover a working process.
Give me an example of Working Under Pressure
HVR POC - Performance Troubleshooting
Situation: HVR POC, BU load tests showing huge latency
Task: Reduce latency to acceptable levels
Action: Worked long hours with HVR to come up with new replication configuration. Calls with BU out of hours testing, identifying bottlenecks.
Result: Came up with new replication patterns and solution to run an newer agent on an on-premise VM. Latency dropped to acceptable levels.
Learning: Keep everyone involved, frequent calls and updates. Use all resources available.
Give me an example of your Adaptability
Situation: Needed a bi-directional, hetrogeneous replication solution
Action: 2 week POC for HVR
Result: Turned into a 7 month project, small team, ended up going back to some DBA work, working with Aurora Postgres, performance tuning, becoming the HVR expert in TR, not work that I wanted to do, the contract was eventually signed.
Learning: Really just the technical skills, but also the importance of proper planning and how to run a big POC.
Give me an example of your Strengths
Situation: Manual Builds/CF templates outside of GIT
Task: All builds run through codepipeline, templates in GIT, align with TR IAC standards
Action: New technologies for us, find out who the experts were in the wider group, learn our IAC standards for git README docs, work out what our templating standards were, had to piece everything together and work through numerous build glitches and features.
Result: Our team had a working CI/CD repeatable build via git and codepipeline.
What did I learn: - That I’m good at jumping in and picking up new skills. Really important to build your network of contacts in an org, not everything is documented. The importance of good documentation
Give me an example of a Weaknesses - but something I’ve improved into a strength
Situation: One of our groups wanted a self-service solution for database admin
Task: Create SNOW forms and automations for self-service
Action: Keen to pick up the work but had lots of other work on my plate.
Result: I ended up working long hours so that dates didn’t slip.
What did I learn:: Not to take too much on, I subsequently pulled myself from a project I really wanted to do so that I could focus on one I don’t want to do and put the company first.
Give me an example of a failure
Situation: Engineers using teams to request work
Task: Create a self-service tool for support and customers to invoke our services using SNOW, IBM CO, IBM fixlets
Action: Worked with other groups to create Snow forms, ICO cloud orchestration workflows to invoke our scripts. Had to learn all of the new technology.
Result: A working solution but one that the customers were not ready for and still had a lot of performance issues.
What did I learn:: Listen to the customers, get them involved early.
