It’s an Exciting Time to Be a Cloud Engineer

Why we’re excited about cloud communications

Following the pandemic, cloud-based communication services have become more and more crucial to most enterprises.

The ability to communicate, share and work on the same applications across different locations, enjoy flexible work practices with access at any time from anywhere, and be assured that all your important data and communications are securely backed up, has really levelled up most communications.

The growth of chatbots across engineering teams has also enabled not just frictionless communication, but the automation of engineering tasks. Everything you need is in one place and available in a relevant state at any time.
There are more exciting developments coming as well, set to position cloud technology closer to the people and devices that need it. This includes being able to collect great new insights that will help us with even better analytics and forecasting, such as our new “On Demand” utilisation within Vodafone – something I’m especially excited about. It lets us build environments, services and test scenarios instantly at any time we need them, then destroy them as soon as we’re done.

This will deliver some serious cost avoidance, but also encourage our teams to be agnostic to a lot of the dependencies we have today. The more data we can analyse, the better insight we will get – and when you combine that with a dynamic infrastructure, you get some pretty exciting capabilities.

Taking Vodafone to the next level with cloud capabilities

Cloud-enabled communications are an amazing way to facilitate frictionless collaboration across businesses of any scale.

At Vodafone, we recently connected 12 European market teams together with one global Engineering team. This has created one of the largest software engineering teams in Europe almost overnight and opens up huge possibilities for us to leverage the scale of our company more than ever.

With all engineering capabilities moving to one main repository, we’re able to accelerate the maturity of all teams by reusing innovations and capabilities created by any one of us. Some of our larger markets like the UK and Germany have been able to take some impressive steps towards becoming truly cloud native, and we can use this to roll it out across Vodafone globally.

There are lots of other amazing cloud related projects underway here, too. Our Vodafone Cloud Services initiative – Telco-as-a-Service” (TaaS) – is causing a lot of buzz. It combines work from across Vodafone into a catalogue of services and capabilities which will then be wrapped up and provided as a managed service to Vodafone teams in every country. We’re really excited about its potential to scale up Vodafone and accelerate our team’s pace of delivery, as well as enhance our customer experiences.

Elsewhere we’re building a self-serving Performance Testing framework, a fully automated Chaos Engineering capability, and a built-in security scanning utility hooked up to our CI/CD pipelines. We’re using all of these progressive capabilities to continuously push our limits and transform our business culture to be more aligned to DevOps principles.