A fireside chat with a Codento consultant on an assignment with Telia – Key takeaways
I am Perttu Pakkanen and my interest as Codento’s talent acquisition lead is to better articulate why consulting could be a great career choice.
When potential customers ponder whether they should use our services, they usually like to see some reference cases. Why wouldn’t our potential employees think the same?
So, I had a chat with our leading cloud architect Jari Timonen. One of Jari’s recent consultancy assignments has been Telia, and specifically Telia’s programme in developing a groundbreaking cloud service, Sirius, with Codento’s team’s help.
I asked Jari to sit with me and share some of his recent reflections. More specifically, I asked Jari to help me understand his last project, the challenges he has overcome, and the skills he has gained.
This would probably also help our candidates to get a glimpse of the day-to-day work, the technical expertise they bring, and why working with us could inspire them.
So, here we go:
Jari, please tell me a bit about the project. What kind of solution have you built?
Sure. We built an entirely new solution—something that has never been done before. It revolves around 5G latency and how edge services fit into that context. We explored how to perform edge computing easily and in a way that can be maintained using appropriate technology.
There was a lot of testing, trying out different ideas, and, of course, some hiccups along the way, but we learned continuously throughout the process.
In the end, we concluded that GKE Enterprise/Anthos was the best fit for the purpose. It allows us to manage edge computing easily and distribute workloads efficiently.
We also utilize GPU capacity at the edge to run AI models.
As expected, that’s very interesting! Then, what kind of tasks have you done in the project?
I’ve done research on the technology and contributed to the architecture. I helped guide the developers, providing insights based on my experience with architectures for the edge computing platform. I was hands-on also, working, e.g., on the configuration.
GKE Enterprise/Anthos played a key role—it’s the management tool for Kubernetes clusters, so we worked a lot with Kubernetes throughout the project.
Most of my work was on higher-level decisions, and I presented these ideas upward within the organization.
Also, of course, lots of coffee drinking and doughnut eating was involved!
I’m sure there was! I also want to know a bit more about the motivational side of the work: What has been the most interesting thing you have done working for the customer? What brings enthusiasm to your workdays? And what has been the most difficult part?
The technology is really interesting as a whole. It’s a highly complex system, but in the end, it solves many problems related to management and automation. Tackling difficult challenges has been very exciting.
As mentioned earlier, no one has really done this before, so a lot of critical thinking was required to figure things out as we went along.
As you know, learning is an integral part of our organization. Thus, the final question: What have you learned?
I’ve learned a lot about edge computing and its applications in the telecom industry. It’s been very insightful to understand how these technologies can be integrated and what opportunities exist for leveraging 5G and edge computing in the future.
Thanks Jari for the short and sweet interview!
Being part of pioneering projects like this allows for both personal and professional development. I strongly feel that at Codento you can engage in work that is not only challenging but also highly impactful in many industries.
Read more about us from our career site and see if there are any suitable opportunities for you!
You can find Jari’s more technical blog about Kubernetes and edge computing here.
About the interviewee:
Jari Timonen is Codento’s Lead Cloud Architect. He has over 20 years of experience in different software development and architecture positions.
About the interviewer:
Perttu Pakkanen is responsible for talent acquisition at Codento. Perttu wants to make sure that the employees enjoy themselves at Codento because it makes his job much easier.
