Blog by Mark Gossa, Commercial Infrastructure Engineering Lead
In July we hosted the PowerShell London UK and UK Cloud Infrastructure user groups for an event in our Vanquis London HQ. It was a great turnout with over 80 people attending, both Vanquis colleagues and tech professionals from other businesses including Barclays. As we’re using PowerShell more and more at Vanquis, it was a really good opportunity for us to chat about our experiences and learn from each other in an informal setting over some food and drink.
To kick off, I shared a story about “A PowerShell Challenge” that I took part in at a previous job. The challenge was to migrate 600 virtual machines from VMware to Hyper-V with minimal downtime and costs. We couldn’t use free tools such as Disk2Vhd, System Center Virtual Machine Manager and Microsoft Virtual Machine Converter as they all require extended downtime, nor could we use tools like Zerto, PlateSpin and DoubleTake due to the cost. In the end, the solution chosen was to back up the virtual machines using Veeam Agent for Windows, restore onto Hyper-V, then reconfigure the networking and prepare for production as needed.
The instructions to do this manually were 28 pages long and took about 1-2 hours of engineering per virtual machine, meaning this was over 7 months of work. Using PowerShell, this was all automated and it was then possible to migrate virtual machines with just a single command, saving months of engineering.
The PowerShell module was about 4,000 lines long with over 80 functions. My presentation included guidelines on how to attack a large automation project like this, an overview of PowerShell functions, modules, Test Driven Development and some specific examples of (the many) issues faced along the way.
Leo D’Arcy (Tech Consultant and a regular attendee of PowerShell events) then spoke about PowerShell DSC and how we can use it to automate server configuration in Azure to reduce the amount of time spent on common tasks. His talk was really valuable and it was great to hear that some Vanquis colleagues returned to work with suggestions on how we can incorporate some of what Leo spoke about in our strategy.
It’s not the first event we’ve held at Vanquis – just before this one Clint, our Software Engineering Lead, hosted the UK Azure User Group and Glynn, Head of Commercial Engineering, hosted an event with DevOps professionals. It’s something we’re starting to do a lot more of, so make sure to keep an eye out for any upcoming events.
These events are a great opportunity to network and share experiences with people in similar roles that face similar tech challenges day to day, but the main reason we host them is because they’re fun! It’s all about being collaborative, sharing learnings and experimenting with new technologies which I think really puts the fun back into IT. They’re also a great opportunity to tell the people that don’t work at Vanquis all about the exciting things we’re working on and all the opportunities we have.
We have a great culture at Vanquis where engineers are encouraged to learn all the time through tailored development plans which include a mixture of in-house and external classroom training, online training and ad-hoc training at our desks. I’ve been at Vanquis for six months now and have not stopped learning new things since the day I started. It’s certainly challenging and very enjoyable and you can get involved with whatever you like – be it C# development, training engineers, Azure, chat bots etc.
Come and join us!
I’m hiring in my team at the moment for Infrastructure Engineers and a Principal Infrastructure Engineer. We're driving automation, Infrastructure as Code and Azure cloud (PaaS and IaaS) technologies and techniques across IT and we also are heavily invested in the Kubernetes and Container space.
If you’re interested in joining the Vanquis challenge and want to find out more about the roles, please contact Kapil Summan or myself on LinkedIn for more information.
Feel free to also check out my blog at: markgossa.blogspot.com or my twitter: @markgossa