A Nomad's Journey: Pit Stop at Cologne

Hello, I am Ian and this is my journey at MobiLab. I am originally from Sri Lanka but I was born and brought up in Kuwait for 18 years. During school, I was uncertain as to which career or profession I wanted to pursue. I wasn’t really fond of studying to be honest. However, during my A-level education, I had some exposure to the world of computing which made me decide to study Software Engineering in Malaysia.

Moving forward in time, I joined MobiLab in 2022 as a close friend of mine recommended the company to me. Initially, I didn’t have the intention to move to Germany due to the language barrier, but what’s life without challenges? So I told myself ‘Let’s do it and see how it turns out. There is no harm trying!’. I am proud to say it was a great decision. MobiLab has really amazing and smart colleagues with an open mind that are always ready to make changes for a better tomorrow. Not forgetting our great multicultural community, it creates an awesome international vibe. Even though I joined from outside of Germany, I never felt left out.

"MobiLab has really amazing and smart colleagues with an open mind that are always ready to make changes for a better tomorrow."

migration specialist employee story ian

Rising Up with MobiLab

Having such a great multicultural community of more than 30 nationalities, it’s amazing to see how everyone gets together. When I started my journey with the migration team, the first project I was part of was with a customer in the construction industry. It was interesting as well as a lot to learn for me. Especially shifting from one public cloud provider to another and it being a completely new field was quite challenging. The customer project explored a number of cloud services such as Azure VM, Universal Print, SQL MI, SQL Databases, and so on. I wasn’t too familiar with some of these services, but this allowed me to explore them. Eventually, learning new technologies or services became the norm, and especially in the IT industry I feel it should be the norm.

One of the migration team’s scopes is to migrate a customer’s workload from on-premises to the cloud without any data loss. It is vital that necessary processes and technical processes have been created around it to ensure we successfully accomplish our goal. With my past knowledge and experience, we worked towards improving our processes and structure to achieve a high success rate in workload migrations. The team’s next path is to automate our migration process. As this kind of work is very process-oriented and has x number of conditions due to different types of workloads, automating the entire end-to-end process is a big challenge. Nevertheless, I’m sure we are able to do it!

Recently, the team explored a new Azure service called Azure VMware Solutions that made moving to the cloud seamlessly without being vendor-locked. With every new product comes a number of challenges and limitations when migrating an entire data landscape. Innovative technologies allow us to find different solutions, ideas, and designs to help the customer to be successful. Personally, I enjoy taking up new and complicated challenges, be it related to my role or not, and working towards solving them. It’s what keeps me driving ahead.

"Having such a great multi-cultural community of more than 30 nationalities, it's amazing to see how everyone gets together."

There is no doubt MobiLab will keep investing in its employees to broaden their knowledge and skillset by exploring and implementing challenging solutions for our customers. In the years to come, I look forward to sharing my knowledge and experience with MobiLab and learning new skills from my colleagues (especially in Terraform & Kubernetes). At the same time, I would also like to improve my public speaking skills at internal broadcasts, meetups, and other company events.

With MobiLab being such a young but fast-growing company, there is certainty that the company will reach great heights with more and more interesting customer projects. If you want to get more insights into what working at MobiLab is like as well as the work we do in the migration team, I’d suggest we can meet up for a coffee on one of our balconies. Feel free to reach out to jobs@mobilabsolutions.com.