Sun sets slowly to the Pacific Ocean on Sunday evening as people start picking up their belongings from the pleasantly warm beach sand. Teemu saunters on the Santa Monica State Beach Pier and turns his head towards the west to enjoy the cooling sea breeze. As he helps his daughter open her ice-cream cone wrappings, his thoughts start to work next week. It’s going to be his third week working from Los Angeles. But how has Teemu ended up with his family in LA, California?
Tasked with building an integration platform on AWS
In the era of cloud technology, all continents are equally accessible by the click of a mouse. It is just as simple to configure an AWS Step Function located in the us-west-1 region (N. California) as it is to do the same in the ap-southeast-2 region (Sydney). But still, on some business-critical occasions, it is worth taking the people in the same room regardless of where in the world they usually operate. And that’s what is currently happening at the west coach of the USA.
“We’ve worked through a cooperation network with a large-scale client headquartered in Los Angeles, CA, for about a year. NordHero’s team has been in charge of building up an integration platform on AWS to tie together a few business-critical information systems for the client.”, says Teemu Niiranen, NordHero’s Senior Cloud Architect, who has been working on the project right from the start.
Global launch requires local communications
NordHero’s cloud architect team currently has ongoing active development, in addition to Finnish clients, also for clients in Sweden, Switzerland, and USA. Teemu adds: “Normally, it is fairly simple to work with cloud technology from anywhere, and even our typical Finnish clients work with multiple regions across the continents. Building global accessibility and sharing workloads and data across regions is a basic requirement nowadays.”
Why did you travel to the other side of the world if the cloud is accessible from anywhere?
“It’s not the cloud. It’s the people. We deployed the first production workloads in US and EU earlier this spring. Next, we plan to set up multiple production instances worldwide in five weeks. And we are not talking about just the stacks running on AWS, but the whole set of interdependent information systems. That requires strict coordination with good and timely communication. To succeed in such operation, you can’t have command loops going through totally different time zones; it is just too slow.”, Teemu describes.
Makes sense. But how is life there in California? How long are the work days, and have you had time to look around the sights on evenings and weekends?
“Working days have remained roughly normal here. Two public holidays, Juneteenth and the 4th of July, coming in a week, allow two more long weekends to experience the local life. In fact, due to the time difference, the working days were occasionally longer in Finland when we had meetings with the client in the evening. And it has been a surprise how friendly the people of the West Coast are, not only at work but also on the leisure side.”, Teemu summarizes his feelings.
Teemu, on a long-forgotten planet named Batuu. Picture taken in Disneyland, CA.
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