The Story
A personal reflection on my experience as a Site Reliability Engineer, transitioning from a security background to managing critical infrastructure for public sector clients. This post shares the challenges, growth, and insights gained while working with cloud technologies and handling production environments at scale.
Today marks my last day at Elitery, and I want to express my deepest gratitude to everyone who has been part of this journey. To my fellow engineers, team leads, and all colleagues - thank you for the collaboration, support, and knowledge sharing that made this experience truly enriching. While I’m moving on to focus on personal growth and work-life balance, I’ll carry forward the valuable lessons and experiences gained here. Wishing the best for Elitery’s continued success!
As I write this on my last day at Elitery, I want to share my experience working as a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) for the past year. This role has been transformative for my professional growth, challenging me in ways I never expected and teaching me valuable lessons along the way.
Tackling Major Projects and Challenges
My primary responsibility was managing infrastructure for one of our most significant clients - the Indonesian Ministry of Health. As my first experience handling a production environment at this scale, it was both daunting and exciting. The project required extensive knowledge of AWS services, including EC2, RDS, S3, EFS, Elasticache, EKS, and Cloudwatch. Beyond infrastructure management, I was also entrusted with security responsibilities, working with AWS WAF and Shield.
The challenges were numerous. When I joined, we were dealing with both monolithic and microservice architectures, often with cluttered resources and inconsistent naming conventions. As our services continued to grow, I had to stay current with open-source technologies that could improve our automation and cost efficiency. While initially overwhelming, these challenges became opportunities for growth and learning.
Key Lessons Learned
My time at Elitery taught me the crucial lesson of work efficiency. I learned that perfection, while admirable, isn’t always practical when managing multiple critical projects. The key was finding the right balance - delivering high-quality work while maintaining the agility to handle new challenges as they arose.
Professional Growth
Coming from a security background, I initially wasn’t sure about transitioning to an SRE role. However, this position has broadened my technical expertise significantly. The intersection of systems engineering and security has given me a unique perspective that I believe will be valuable throughout my career. I’m grateful for the opportunity to have worked in this role, as it has helped me develop a more comprehensive understanding of both infrastructure and security domains.
Moving Forward
My decision to move on stems from a need to find better work-life balance. While remote work offered flexibility, the 24/7 on-call nature of the role, particularly during incidents, proved challenging over time. I believe there’s room for improvement in how these operational demands are managed.
Final Thoughts
I leave Elitery with gratitude for the experiences and growth opportunities I’ve had. To my fellow engineers who continue to maintain and improve our systems - you are an incredible team, and I wish you all the best. I hope Elitery continues to evolve and find ways to make the work environment more efficient for everyone.
The past year has been an invaluable learning experience, and while this chapter comes to a close, I’m thankful for every challenge, success, and lesson learned along the way.
Extras
This are picture of my team at Elitery :)
I wanna thank you to my team for all of the support and journey that you guys have been given to me
See you on top! 🫡