The Service Manager has become a key piece for IT management in organizations.
It is the person responsible for the implementation and monitoring of all processes linked to the management of corporate information systems.

The function of the Service Manager at Geko is to provide versatility in the vision of both the client and the technical team in the different phases.
Adapting the client’s needs and ensuring the correct execution of the agreed actions.

On the other hand, the Service Manager, together with the TAM, is in charge of aligning the roadmap in the medium and long term, contributing their business/technology vision thanks to having accredited technical knowledge with the main cloud and Kubernetes certifications.

Some of its most relevant functions are:

• Ensure compliance with SLAs
• Responsible for IT implementation
• IT partner
• IT profitability
• Team formation
• Skills for dealing with customers
• Skills for dealing with management
• Skills to communicate and train

In addition, the Service Manager must have essential qualities and skills such as:

• Teamwork
• Ability to make decisions and solve problems
• Plan, organize and prioritize work
• Communication capacity
• Ability to obtain and process information
• technical knowledge

At Geko Cloud, we are a Cloud Consulting formed by a team that is integrated into the day-to-day of our clients, to give value to a quality service and a totally personalized experience.

We take off together?

We share some Case Studies where our values ​​and efforts are reflected in the results of the projects we have carried out.

We hope that this article has helped you to learn something new and continue expanding your knowledge.
We invite you to contact us if you need information about the Cloud and DevOps world and keep checking our blog to find other useful publications.

La entrada Service Manager role se publicó primero en Geko Cloud.

General rules:

• Configure a main account dedicated to billing, and then configure subaccounts/projects linking invoice to that account
• In each account/project, configure a budget and an alert if consum exceeds a certain amount (to be defined depending on your usual consume) (AWS, GCP, Azure. This way you’ll be warned during the month… and not at the end receiving bill.
•  If your account has several projects/environments, use labels/tags to be able to identify each resource.
• Export your billing to a database (Athena / Bigquery ) This has a cost (not really expensive if you don’t pass your day querying it) but allows you to have much more details in some cases. For instance in this AWS invoice we can see 595$ of datatransfer out without any details.

 If you go on Athena, we can see that this is mainly due to a loadbalancer.

If we want to save money on that resource, we know where to start.

Finaly review periodically your bills (every 3/6/12 months)

Bill review:

One of best automatic tool you could use is CloudCheckr. After configuring an account in your project it gives you instances that are oversized. Bad thing is that:

• It’s done checking CPU but not RAM. One instance with few CPU usage but full of RAM can’t be resized.
• It doesn’t take into “auto-scalling” instances that are up and down automatically

So another way is to check bill manually. Go to billing details, and review costs, starting by highest one to lowest. Here are some question you can ask yourself for each service

S3:

• Is versioning active and needed? Versioning on a backup’s bucket can be very costly for instance
• All files are regularly accessed? If not you can implement lifecycle to save money in buckets with lots of data
• Files can be deleted after xx days? If so you can also implement a lifecycle

Instances:

• Check CPU / RAM use in your instances and resize your instances if possible
• Is autoscalling correctly configured? You may not need that much instances always up.
• Could you stop some instances at night / on week ends?

Volums:

•  Check unmounted volums and delete them if they are useless

Databases:

• Check CPU / RAM use and resize them if possible

Load balancer:

• Check if loadbalancers could be group in a single one.
• All loadbalancers are usefull? (one loabalancer with a single instance, or returning 200 could be useless)

Those are example for some services. Obviously each case is diferent, so if you’re still lost with all of this, feel free to contact us. We could help you to configure everything.

Instance reservation

Finally, once infrastructure is correctly provisioned (Instances with correct sizing, up/down xx hours per day) we can reserve instances. In other words you commit to keep instances for a certain time, and eventually paying upfront. In exchange you’ll have some discounts. The longest we commit and the most we pay upfront… The most will be our discount.
But we’ll see that in an incoming article.

We hope that this article has been useful to you and we are very attentive that soon we will continue publishing more related content.

From Geko we can adives you to maximize cost savings in your cloud system.

If you would like to get to know us better, check out our services. Please do not hesitate to contact us if you require further information

La entrada Cost Control in Cloud se publicó primero en Geko Cloud.

These activities allow employees to learn from each other and develop new skills, e.g. to achieve a goal, the group has to reach an agreement, which requires good communication and active listening. Teamwork enables the ability to solve problems, work out strategies and make decisions, and also teaches team members to be responsible for their decisions and actions.

Some of the activities we carried out in our last team building have been competitive activities such as laser tag. The aim of this type of activity is to encourage team spirit among employees, allowing them to work with other teams and to improve interpersonal relationships among employees.

In conclusion, this type of event strengthens three basic principles among employees: motivation, teamwork, and experiences, which is why at Geko Cloud we value this type of activity, as it improves the overall results of the company and, at the same time, creates a more positive and collaborative work environment, thus improving the company’s productivity. We are looking forward to the next team-building event to continue growing!

If you want to join the geko-family, check out our job offers!

La entrada The relevance of team building se publicó primero en Geko Cloud.

Geko started its journey just over two years ago with small projects and a structure that worked, but as larger projects came in we realised the need to manage them more efficiently.

What is the role of an Architecture Lead in DevOps?

A DevOps architect is a person who takes care of the infrastructure, development and deployment of the product and is responsible for creating a continuous, automated, feedback-driven pipeline in line with DevOps goals.

The role of Architecture Lead at Geko Cloud

Our colleague and Architecture Lead at Geko cloud, Xavi Miranda, explains his main objective as responsible in this position, highlighting the optimisation and standardisation of the architecture to develop all projects in the most efficient way possible, improving the scalability of the business both internally and in terms of the KPIs of our customers.

Here you can learn more about this role and how we face it at Geko Cloud:

At Geko cloud we want to be an extension of your technical team, allowing them to focus on the development of your product while we take care of it with the best DevOps practices.

CONTACT US AND LET’S TALK ABOUT HOW WE COULD HELP YOU MAKE YOUR PLATFORM MORE AGILE AND SECURE!

La entrada The role of the architecture lead se publicó primero en Geko Cloud.

Geko —now two years old— is at the beginning of the peak of its growth. Currently, with fourteen people on staff and a continuously growing client portfolio, different needs are beginning to be perceived in terms of the management and structure of the company.
For this reason, some new roles have been established to manage the team from different perspectives. One of them is the SRE Lead (Site Reliability Engineer), which we will talk about in this post.

Why was the role of SRE Lead born?

Prior to the existence of this position, there was some difficulty in understanding between the development team and the operations team. While the first ones are in charge of launching their code and the second ones maintain it in production, both parties were poorly connected with little knowledge of the code on the part of the operators and little information on the operational and infrastructure practices on the part of the developers.
It is because of these frictions that the DevOps methodology began to be implemented in companies, a set of good practices that generate a connection between developers and operators.

What is the SRE post like?

This role is still quite new and its performance may not always be clear, although more and more companies are counting on it. At Geko, we consider it essential to implement this role in this growth phase in order to automate as much as possible in the company’s operational processes.
For the SRE role, it is necessary to have skills in terms of work methodology as well as personal management skills. The role is based on ensuring consistency in the implementation of projects and managing project expectations. This is why certain personal skills are required, as you can be very adept at automation and have extensive technical knowledge, but you need to know what questions to ask, know precisely what the team is working on, and communicate effectively.

The SRE rol in Geko Cloud

Juan Vela is our Site Reliability Engineer, to get his perspective on his own function we asked him a few questions, key points that he considers this rol has whithin Geko Cloud and the benefits it brings indirectly to the customer.

Don’t miss this short video where Juan explains his role as a SRE Lead in Geko.

At Geko cloud we want to be an extension of your technical team, allowing them to focus on the development of your product while we take care of it with the best DevOps practices.

Contact us and let’s talk about how we could help you make your platform more agile and secure!

La entrada SRE lead’s role in the company se publicó primero en Geko Cloud.

Today we want to talk to you about Geko cloud, what it is and why it was created.

Geko was created two and a half years ago by David and José Luis. After years of experience in the Internet sector, they saw the need for a service that would cover the entire life cycle of the product, so that developers could fully dedicate themselves to developing it.

Geko’s team works on a daily basis with clients dedicated to various commercial activities, from the pharmaceutical industry, financial products, training, comparators, to marketplaces. Our mission is to collaborate with each of them in their rapid and secure growth, strengthening their technical team and managing their infrastructures.

For the people who make up Geko, it is very important to keep up fluid communication with each client’s development team, trying to adapt methodologies and technologies as much as possible to their needs and preferences.

What do we do?

At Geko, we analyse your infrastructure in order to improve automation and internal processes, so that the deployment of your application is agile, efficient and secure, which results in an improvement in time to market and your KPIs.

Platform architecture

We design an architecture adapted to your needs and that grows according to your real demand. We help you to divide it into smaller services so that it is easier to maintain, to manage and to allow the team to work in an agile and productive way.

Monitoring

We implement monitoring platforms to operate preventive and reactive tracking of your platform/companies so that you can prevent future failures and understand where they come from.

DevOps

You may have heard this term a lot but you don’t know specifically what it refers to. Well, beyond entering into discussions of whether DevOps is a philosophy or a culture, we can describe it as a methodology based on the integration of the work of developers and system administrators, which makes it possible for the first ones to dedicate themselves to development and their code can be deployed in seconds.

At Geko, we implement DevOps methodologies so that all our clients’ work is replicable, traceable and secure.

Why Geko?

We know the problems you may face and we have a background of experience in proposing efficient solutions, avoiding the technical costs that can result from wrong implementations, using the best practices on the market.

Unlike other companies, we do not work exclusively with any cloud service provider. We are free to adapt to the needs of our clients and introduce ourselves into their methodologies and work philosophy.

Direct contact and proximity to our clients is a fundamental pillar of our service, which is why we work as one more piece of their internal team.

We want to help you achieve your goals! Shall we talk?

La entrada Geko, your DevOps team se publicó primero en Geko Cloud.