Embracing Sustainability and Circular Economy in IT Companies
In today's rapidly evolving technological landscape, sustainability has become more than just a buzzword—it's a necessity. As concerns about climate change and resource depletion continue to grow, IT companies are looking to integrate sustainability and circular economy principles into their operations. Let's explore how IT company Deutsche Telekom IT Solutions Slovakia is leading the charge in creating a more sustainable future.
If you want to invite Michal Rusnak for a cup of coffee, rather not. He is a tea lover He believes that a smartphone is the best invention in the 21st century, do you agree? Michal is also a huge fan of AI that will be a future game changer according to him. How did he start in Open Sovereign Cloud area?
Following the Skill shifter program, he switched Linux/Windows Admin to a new career path. There are several opportunities for development and personal growth in our company; so, Michal did it. Currently, he is a great performer for the Open Sovereign Cloud product to be inspired from
Why? Read more.
What Martin Palko, Chapter Lead admires about Michal?
“He has joined our team only recently as a finisher of Skill shifter program. Already during this program, where main emphasis is on self-study, Michal has demonstrated strong proactivity and quickly tackled challenging Kubernetes certificates. He carries on with this characteristic which helped him to overtake (with another senior colleague) whole monitoring stack of the product. With his operations experience he is always helpful to other colleagues.”
Michal, what makes working for DT IT Solutions Slovakia appealing to you?
We have an opportunity to work with the newest technologies, as mentioned to develop new product from scratch (it all has started in 2022) and we are an amazing group of people on the project. We have great collaboration and wonderful social activities - lots of teambuilding, mutually agreed office day, meetups, and friendships outside of office. We have the SPIRIT
Marek Krafcik is a fan of Star Wars. His most favorite is mini-series Ahsoka. The one that appealed to him the most was the history of Arda by J. R. R. Tolkien, do you know it too?
Marek agrees with Michal (and the rest of the world ) that AI, Health Tech and Augmented reality will boost up tech revolution in the upcoming years.
But he likes to relax with a cup of cappucino with cinnamon after a hard day resolving an Open Sovereign Cloud issues.
How does Martin Palko, Chapter lead describe him?
“When I have started on a new Chapter Lead position for Open Sovereign Cloud in May 2022 Marek has already been hired. He was one of few juniors within the team surrounded by seniors facing huge personal challenge to step his game up and fit in. Not only by his skillset but mainly by great attitude he managed to do that very well. He has become an integral part of PaaS Stream and I think it is a great start of his career in our company. He is always willing to give more than what is just required.”
Marek, what do you personally like about the project?
On the OSC project we are using latest and modern open-source cloud-native technologies and principles. I would like to highlight especially Go language and Kubernetes which are core technologies of this project. That’s what I personally like about the project. There is always something new to be learned from.
// Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration system for automating software deployment, scaling, and management.
// Go is a statically typed, compiled high-level programming language designed at Google. It is syntactically like C.
Could you describe us the background of the Open Sovereign Cloud, guys?
Currently, we are working on a project with about 60 people worldwide, and we find it surprising that half of them is from Slovakia. It's wonderful that we are actively involved in the development of such a large project from scratch rather than just doing operational support.
If our team is separated into three streams, each member is assigned to a sub-team based on his or her knowledge, prior experiences, and personal preferences.
OSC 3 Streams are:
- onMetal (Infrastructure as a Service) – sub-team dedicated to software defined and bare-metal infrastructure.
- Gardener (Platform as a Service) – sub-team dedicated to development and maintenance of Managed Kubernetes environments in compliance with cloud-native principles, implementation of newest open-source cloud-native solutions.
- Software Services (Software as a Service) – sub-team dedicated to development of additional features, controllers, operators for Software Services such as Kafka, Kyma, PostgreSQL using Go language.
What are clients' top benefits from using Open Sovereign Cloud?
The main advantage of our product are data, technological and operational sovereignty. Meaning our customers have authority and control over encryption, usage and access to their data, transparency over access by the cloud provider’s or any other 3rd party and make IT decisions independently of the product decisions of proprietary providers. Data are stored and operations carried out within the EU in accordance with Gaia-X initiative. Having said that our target industries are healthcare and public sector in DACH region.
Our first customer Barmer – is one of the largest and most respected public health insurance providers in Germany with product IDP.
What team challenges as well as individual ones lie ahead?
Marek Krafcik
“As this environment is constantly evolving and progressing, we both need to consistently expand our technical skills to meet our individual challenges and ambitions. We must continue to adapt and learn new pertinent technologies because the IT world is known to evolve more quickly than any other industry.”
Michal Rusnak
“We want to emphasize that every member of our team is enrolling in classes and obtaining certifications in the technology being utilized on the project, such as Certified Kubernetes Administrator, which is well-known and regarded globally.”
Our team has a few significant challenges ahead of it, including enhancing the stability and performance of our product, creating new features, and bringing on new clients. But we are sure, we can handle it together.
About Michal and Marek
Michal Rusnak is officially part of Open Sovereign Cloud team since March 2023. He joined the second wave of Skill shifter program in 2022 where a group started with the Cloud technologies, especially with containerization technologies such as Kubernetes which is core of this project. Michal decided to join Skill shifter program last year due to his motivation to keep up with latest technologies and to step up in his career. Before this program he used to be a part of Linux / Windows administration team that was handling simple L1 tasks.
"I wanted to be a part of some bigger project and develop something on my own, " Michal adds.
Marek Krafcik
After his studies at University, he worked 3 years in IT as technician when he got an opportunity to work for DT IT Solutions Slovakia. During his job interview, he was asked it’s not a problem to work with Kubernetes and Linux. That’s how he became a part of OSC, now he is glad for this decision.
"OSC TEAM is wonderful group of people and the product we are developing from scratch is everyone’s baby whom all of us are proud of, " Marek thinks.
Author: Ivana Marcinková, Communication Specialist
