The role of Operations Engineer
The role of a Operations Engineer at Frends combines integration and software development
Operations Engineer Ossi Galkin and Aleksi Hytönen describe what it is like to work at Frends and reflect why the integration world offers such interesting challenges.
As a student, Ossi Galkin had never heard of integrations, which aren’t usually taught at universities.
“After having started working at Frends I realized that this is a rapidly growing market offering plenty of career opportunities. All organizations have data that needs to be stored somewhere – for example in a database. When data needs to be transferred, integrations are required”, Galkin describes.
The market is constantly growing as single systems are introduced more and more. Similarly, data needs to be transferred between systems. Gradually point-to-point integrations form a so-called integration spaghetti, in which data is less controllable and secure.
The purpose of an integration platform is, hence, to increase the transparency of data and to provide a simple interface that monitors the data movement. The manual work and error sensitivity that are related to the maintenance of single integrations are significantly decreased.
Frends is a hybrid integration platform, which can be utilized in a cloud environment.
“Naturally there have been enterprise integration platforms before Frends eiPaaS. They have been extremely rigid to use and only enabled data transfer in a data center”, Galkin says.
The competitive edge of Frends is its user-friendliness. Very little special knowledge related to Frends is needed.
“With Frends you can execute SQL queries to SQL databases and REST requests to web services. Frends utilizes standard methods, which are taught at universities or can be easily learned with the help of Google.”
Operations Engineer role
Galkin thinks that the versatile role of a Operations Engineer at Frends is somewhere between software and integration developer.
Together with his colleague, Aleksi Hytönen, Galkin works as a part of the Frends Operations team. Hytönen adds that their common goal is to ensure the smooth use of the integration platform and to offer reliable support in challenging situations.
“We create and maintain tasks that enable the build of integrations. To be capable of fixing we additionally create tasks and small development for in-house needs on top of Frends.”
Often customers have questions regarding the use of the product – for example, how a certain kind of data is modified to another form before it is sent forward. Sometimes we have to figure out problems related to user backend systems or problems related to invalid data.
“Every day is different from each other. We get to learn about different databases, CRMs and mobile backends as all partners and clients have a unique IT architecture. At times we train our customers."
Object-oriented programming, C#, Java, or Python knowledge are extremely beneficial for the role of a Operations Engineer. Interest towards process automation is crucial.
Strong team spirit and trust building the culture
According to Hytönen, colleagues know each other well and have a lot of conversations. The culture is built on trust.
“What matters is that the job gets done. Everything can be agreed in a flexible manner. During a work day it is ok to play squash or do grocery shopping.”
Hytönen highlights the importance of openness and the ability for team play.
“When working in teams one must know how to communicate both positive and negative matters. Otherwise, something meaningful might be left in the dark.”