Meet Varun, a Melbourne-based Senior Manager in our Cloud Engineering team. He’s passionate about all things Cloud and DevOps, building a community of Cloud enthusiasts via Deloitte Cloud Guild and being a volunteer Yoga teacher.

So, tell us about a day in the life … 

My day starts early with an hour-long Yoga and meditation practice. Believe it or not, I’ve lived all my life without getting addicted to coffee or tea, Yoga is my “cup of tea” thanks to my Yoga Guru who continues to inspire me every day.

As much as I want to work from our beautiful 477 Collins St. office in Melbourne, I usually work from home – avoiding the rush to get to the railway station. I settle down at my workstation exactly at 9am after having a light breakfast. These days I’m part of a massive cloud migration project, so my day gets busy with application design workshops, planning and executing application migrations and good stuff like that. 

I believe in continuous learning, so I spend at least an hour every day keeping up with the current affairs in the world of cloud – mainly by reading blog posts and listening to podcasts. I also take some time in my day to lead and plan varied activities for the Deloitte Cloud Guild, a thriving community of cloud enthusiasts.

On Tuesdays and Thursdays we conduct a 15-minute meditation session over Teams – it’s open to everyone and I invite you stop by to rejuvenate your mind! 

Outside the office, I teach Yoga classes every Saturday at a nearby community hall and take pride in learning  Konnakol(the art of performing percussion syllables vocally) with my daughter under the direction of my Guru, who is a world-renowned artist.

From your perspective, how does Cloud help our clients unlock business benefits?

I was part of an AI & ML project at one of Victoria’s largest utility (electricity and gas) companies.

The problem

Since the introduction of Smart Meters, the company had gained an unprecedented amount of data that it stores in its on-premises data warehouse, but the company’s data warehouse lacked the flexibility and agility to enable it to respond nimbly to market forces.

The solution

The award-winning serverless data platform we built on AWS was aimed at improving grid resilience by enabling them to segment its electricity customers based on real-time insights. With this capability, they are now able to provide more personalised communications to its customers, to help them avoid potential bill shock when they are using more electricity.

My role

My role in this project was to plan and build a secure AWS environment and a Automated DevOps Pipeline to deploy all the components serverless platform on to AWS using AWS CodePipeline and AWS CloudFormation.

The future

I believe that this project laid the foundation for their cloud transformation journey which led to a cloud migration project of which I’m proudly part of. We’re currently helping them to realise their vision of becoming a fully cloud enabled company.

• Favourite song? - A Million Dreams from The Greatest Showman
• Five star book? - Sapiens, A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari
• Favourite Movie? - Matrix Trilogy

To meet more of our team, please visit our Humans of Cloud home page.