Originally posted 16th June 2022
Moving back to the UK and starting in Cloud Engineering was another big change for me – up till this point I hadn’t worked in a formal Agile team, taking a more classic project approach, and I hadn’t done a huge amount on public Azure cloud either! What I did have was a track record of building and growing highly successful teams and delivering complex infrastructure projects.
Coming in to Cloud Services gave me the chance to learn from my team and develop my skills in Agile and SCRUM, while helping to bring fresh eyes and knowledge. A key part of all of my journey has been the opportunity to surround myself with great people and learn from them, while hopefully imparting some knowledge back! Here I had another highly multinational team spanning a good portion of the globe to work with, along with the challenges and possibilities of a fully remote team. I guess this gave me a good head start for what would come in 2020, having had 4 years of experience of working from home and managing a team spread across multiple countries and time zones who didn’t get to meet face to face very often!
It was now that I finally fully immersed myself in cloud, developing my skills from on-prem infra and virtualisation in to cloud, as well as containerisation and Kubernetes. Getting to work across a multitude of customers with different requirements, as well as hugely differing views of cloud and what it meant to them, helped hone my own skills in how to view and shape cloud strategy for customers. Here we really embraced the Infrastructure as Code, data driven approach, building on the knowledge the team bought together from their own previous projects and roles to take it to a new level of automation and repeatability, allowing for rapid delivery of complex, secure cloud environments.
Over my time in the team my job title changed a few times as I took on wider scopes of responsibilities, including working with AWS and GCP. I had the opportunity to engage with a wide variety of customers across multiple industries, learning the challenges each see with the cloud, and perhaps most importantly the solutions they needed solving that cloud might be able to help with. It can be far too easy to look at what we can do with the technology available and sometimes lose track of what the actual problems we needed to solve in the first place. Starting without clearly defined criteria of the real needs and problem to be solved can easily result in a solution that just keeps growing in scope and complexity that in the end doesn’t solve the initial problem.
Taking those skills I moved to our CTO team, as part of the Manufacturing Industry CTO. Here I got to look at a new industry for me, and the industry (as well as customer) specific challenges around Cloud, Edge and IoT. It’s here I started to delve in to Digital Platforms and how to take the next step in a digital transformation journey, embracing data and APIs at the heart.
And that brings me to my final role in Atos – in 2021 I took the opportunity to move back to Major Events to head up their Cloud, Infrastructure and DevOps team. This period of my career lasted just over a year, but I hope in that year I managed to make a big impact, bringing back the knowledge and ideas I had gained. I’ve said this for each part of my journey, but in each case it is true – yet again I had a great team to work with, share ideas with and learn from. It also gave me the chance to work on two further Olympic deliveries – Tokyo 2020 and Beijing 2022.
For me it was great to see the evolution since Rio 2016 and the continuation of what was started there, with the move not just to cloud, but also the shift in the applications to microservices and containerisation. Beijing also gave me the opportunity to work with a new cloud provider to me, Alibaba Cloud. The data driven, IaC approach we had adopted made it easy to consume cloud, whether it be Alibaba or anyone else, ensuring a secure and standardised approach to deployment in a multi-cloud environment.
So that’s a quick look at my path through Atos, and some of the technological evolution I’ve seen over that time. As I’ve kept this focused more on the changing technologies, there’s a few areas I didn’t touch on such as my tenures in the Scientific Community and Expert Communities. These bodies gave me the opportunity to work with some of the most brilliant people in Atos, and provide my own thought leadership to our strategy and contributing to white papers; another highly formative experience for me, and yet again really based around the people.
But this brings to an end my 17 year journey in Atos: from configuring a Cisco 7200 router via a console cable to automated deployment of complex multi-cloud environments. I am hugely grateful to each and every person who I have got to work with and learn from in that time, and I hope I have left a bit of a legacy here and there!
Adam's Thoughts 
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