The RBC Cloud team empowers RBC to accelerate the speed of software delivery and brings differentiated products to our clients, while improving the efficiency of our infrastructure.
Meet Joshua Agboola, Senior Cloud Developer, Zephyr Hybrid Cloud.
Tell us about your current role and experience at RBC.
I’m a cloud engineer and Senior Cloud Developer. I joined the team in 2022, and it has been a great journey so far. During my time at RBC, I’ve matured as an engineer with the opportunity to tackle many different technical challenges while building a Kubernetes based platform to host a wide variety of applications for different lines of business.
Kubernetes is an open source platform used for managing containerized applications. Kubernetes offers scalability, resiliency, and portability, which is why we use it as a foundation that allows developers in RBC to focus on innovation and agile development.
During 1-1 discussions with my manager, he always says, “Don’t think of yourself as just a developer writing code, but as a systems engineer.” As an engineer I take great pride in designing and building a platform to address business needs, improve developer experience and operational efficiency.
What does a typical week on the Cloud team look like?
A lot can happen in a week. Recently, two of our cloud experts participated in a HashiTalk virtual conference, and we partnered with the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, to give back to the technology community that has been so critical to our success on our cloud journey. We work within an agile framework in two weeks sprints, that involve daily standups and sprint planning.
Our daily standups are used to brief the team on the status of the tasks, highlight blockers or challenges, share important findings and ask for guidance. This helps the team stay aligned throughout the week.
During our sprint planning we discuss upcoming projects and define the work for the two weeks ahead. At the end of each sprint, we will do a review and retrospective to discuss what went well, what didn’t go well and what can be done differently. What’s next for the Cloud team?
Building a reliable platform on Kubernetes that can meet the requirements of various app teams introduces a set of exciting challenges.
To improve our platform reliability and performance we are exploring eBPF technologies for network monitoring and observability within our Kubernetes clusters. With these improvements we can enhance the security of our platform and the workloads we run.
With all the success we’ve had, we’ve been asked to expand our capabilities globally to new areas of the business. This is a big project that requires collaboration across different teams within the Cloud organization. This is a great opportunity to improve our capabilities and make it a true product. The goal is to deliver a platform that improves developer productivity, and collaboration is integral in the process.
