Here at EarlyDog, we like to think that our small but mighty team of cloud engineers is the driving force behind our success. They work daily with our customers to go above and beyond for any of their hosting and infrastructure needs. Our engineers are experienced in their field, and passionate about what they do. They’re problem solvers, collaborators, and technical gurus.

But what is a day in the life of a cloud engineer at our company actually like?

We sat down with three members of our Ops Team to ask (in the infamous words of Bob and Bob from Office Space) “what would you say… you do here” at EarlyDog?

Being a fully remote team allows our engineers to get some extra R&R before diving into their work. Jason begins his days by spending some quality time with his two kids. Brad likes to have a quiet morning with a hot cup of tea before joining the daily standup meeting. Patrick walks his two dogs every morning to his barn to check on the goats and chickens before logging in.

Once they’re at their desks, our engineers get to work on a variety of activities, including:

• Designing new cloud infrastructure to support our customers’ growth plans
• Examining existing cloud architecture for improvements that would benefit our customers
• Monitoring our customers’ systems and ensuring effective operations on a daily basis
• Providing ongoing infrastructure management and maintaining quality customer communication via Slack

Solving problems with specific constraints for customers brings us joy. For instance, one of our customers recently required a zero-downtime solution for database management. Taking their needs into account, our Ops Team set out to identify the best option to safely apply those changes without any negative impacts to the clients.

They achieved this by setting up a test environment, seeding millions of rows of production-like data into the test database via Python. They then performed multiple tests to ensure the appropriate solution was chosen, all while identifying any underlying risks and taking the necessary measures to mitigate those. By applying our team’s diverse skills to tackle this challenge, they were able to successfully deploy the production database changes with zero downtime.

There are a million tech companies in the world, so why do our engineers choose to stay with us?

Their overwhelming answer was the opportunities for collaboration within the small team dynamic. Each engineer emphasized they feel like they are actively contributing to the success of the company, with a strong sense of camaraderie felt among one another. Coupled with our focus on work-life balance (who else can say they can go feed their goats in the morning before work?!), it’s no wonder why we have such a tight-knit team.