Written by Yekti Crow

Pushpay SRE Team

The team at Pushpay are passionate about sharing knowledge with future tech superstars. This time, their Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team represented by Peter Goodman (Director of SRE) and Sarah Walker (Site Reliability Engineer 3) delivered a Cloud Masterclass bootcamp to Summer of Tech students. We conducted this bootcamp online through Zoom and it was attended by 67 students from all over New Zealand.

Cloud? What is it?

The two presenters started out by giving an overview of what Cloud Computing really is. Cloud provides infrastructure on demand, APIs for creating and destroying machines and paying for what you use. The famous analogy of “pets vs cattle” being the same as having your own physical server versus using the cloud. If something goes wrong with your pet, you would have to spend money and time fixing the problem. Cattle are seen as more easily replaceable, and you’d more likely replace the herd than focus on fixing each cow’s problem. This is comparable to shutting down the cloud and starting a new one!Cloud also has the ability to store, compute and apply services such as database management, content delivery network (CDN), machine learning and security in a serverless environment. Peter and Sarah gave some real examples of how the Pushpay team utilises cloud in their day-to-day activities as part of their core business.

Breakout Activities

Students were given the chance to solve three challenges in a breakout session where they teamed up with other students. The three challenges were:

• The COVID-19 situation resulted in the increase of online services demands. You will get 10x - 50x of your normal traffic on a Sunday at 1:00 am - 7:00 am where your website suddenly stops responding. What do you do?
• More web nodes has meant increased load on your database. You’re seeing CPU spikes further through the system. How do you respond?
• Web nodes are scaled out, databases are scaled up, but there is still pressure on the system. What are other ways you can relieve the amount of traffic?

After three minutes of discussion within their groups, everyone regrouped in the main Zoom room and shared their proposed solutions to each situation. It was very interesting to see the different ways of approaching a problem and how to solve it as a team!

Join Pushpay’s Team This Summer!

Pushpay believes in a blameless culture in their workplace. It makes their team members able to identify and solve problems without assigning blame to a particular person or team. It is an environment of growth and support. If you are interested to be part of Pushpay, apply for their summer internship roles by registering yourself here.

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