Development Operations Intern

My name is Pranav Kumar, I am a development operations intern at Quicken for the summer of 2019. I’m a rising senior at UC Irvine studying Computer Science. I have been working on deploying, monitoring and maintaining servers in the cloud that are used to host the Quicken web services more efficiently.

I have done a lot of “low-level” (in computer science low-level means programming that provides little or no abstraction of programming concepts and is very close to writing actual machine instructions) work. One example of this is I was given a task of monitoring the CPU, memory and disk space usage on different EC2 (server) instances. For CPU monitoring I was able to write a function in AWS lambda to use AWS cloudwatch to handle this but AWS did not provide functionality to monitor memory or disk space metrics in the free tier. As a result, I had to login remotely to an EC2 instance (with ssh) and write scripts that calculate metrics such as memory or disk space usage and returns warnings and creates JIRA tickets back to the team if any of the instances are at alert (this requires rather low level scripting). Then I had to parallel ssh this script into every EC2 instance, start it up, and also start up a cronjob for every instance (ie. this job will run every 6 hours).

I also used a lot of cloud technology such as AWS, datadog, jenkins for other tasks and learned the different problems corporations with large dependencies on cloud computing face, the benefits of cloud computing, and the types of engineering problems dev ops engineers tackle.

I really enjoyed my time at Quicken this summer! I hung out with my coworkers and some of the interns outside of work and that was fun. During my time at Quicken I learned of many different ways to solve problems which reminded me of the saying ‘there is more than one way to skin a cat’. I experimented with many different coding strategies to solve a variety of problems and was faced with many pros/cons situations. This helped me build my problem solving abilities.