Get to Know a Technical Account Management Lead: Sean Hamlin

"Get to Know..." is a new blog series meant to share the stories of the individuals behind the scenes at amazee.io and help you get to know them better. Our people make amazee.io special, and we're excited to introduce them to you.

You'll meet Sean Hamlin, a Technical Account Manager at amazee.io, this month. Sean has been with amazee.io for almost a year and a half and is based in Wellington, New Zealand.

Here are some fun facts about Sean:

His favorite movies are… Shawshank Redemption, The Matrix, and John Wick.

His favorite food is… BBQ brisket

His favorite musical artists are… Metallica, Phil Collins, and Eminem.

Tell us more about your role as a Technical Account Manager. What does a typical day look like?

I review cluster health, communicate with end customers to discover what is happening (e.g., a site launch planned or a high-traffic event), escalate issues to the support or product teams, and handle reporting. I always try to stay one step ahead and avoid problems before they happen.

What do you like most about your work?

I find creative solutions to complex problems and make the implementation as simple as possible—also, boring site launches.

What is your favorite success story as a Technical Account Manager?

This would have to be the response to COVID-19 by the team for GovCMS. During the peak of the traffic, we were:

• Reviewing the scaling settings daily for the impacted sites to ensure the settings were optimal for this 'new normal' of traffic
• Staying in constant contact with the end customers and GovCMS
• Scaling the infrastructure where needed to keep up with demand

The result was zero downtimes during GovCMS's busiest period and up to 100,000 page views on www.health.gov.au during the peak minute. (You can read more about this in our GovCMS case study.)

What do you find most unique about amazee.io when working with your clients?

Lagoon runs on Kubernetes, which offers many elegant tools. For example, you can scale the running application within the bounds of the existing cluster size.

What do you like most about working at amazee.io? Or, what is your favorite memory from your time at amazee.io so far?

A Lagoon meeting in Austin (pre-COVID-19) brought a bunch of the team together while we hacked away, getting Lagoon to deploy into native Kubernetes (it was only OpenShift before that).

It was neat to hang out with the team in a giant shared house and get to know each other a bit more, all while being in Texas, which is undoubtedly unique for someone from New Zealand.

What is your favorite amazee.io Slack channel?

#social-random

What do you like to do when you aren’t working?

Running around after my two kids, 2 and 4.

If you could share a meal with anyone, living or dead, who would it be and why?

Bill Gates. It would be nice to meet a billionaire motivated to improve the planet.

If you were a superhero, what would your power be?

Doctor Strange’s time-control ability would undoubtedly come in handy.

Is there anything else you’d like people to know about you or your role as a Technical Account Manager?

I try to be open and approachable and will teach anyone anything I know.