It's Good to be Back!

Hi my fellow readers and writers! I'm finally back!. I've been off for more than 2 weeks I guess?

I am sure some of you have noticed my long absence, specially those whom I've been regularly exchanging comments already. Maybe some of you are already thinking what has happened to me, specially that my last two articles is about my Covid-19 experiences..Apologies folks if I made some of you worried about my whereabout.

So before anything else, I mean, before posting any articles, I wanted to let you know the main reason for my sudden disappearance.

Three weeks ago, I've been so occupied at work. We had a severity one outage that impacted all of the firm's applications because our entire primary datacenter lost power. That means, all of our applications went down. And hence we needed to fail them over to our secondary datacenter orelse our company will lost lots of money due to no trading activity can be done caused by trading applications being down.

On the day where the outage happened, I have extended 8 hours from my normal 9-hour shift, including 1 hour break time.

I am supposed to logoff by 11:00 pm but that day, my shift ends 7:00 AM the following day. It took me lots of time before I qm able to completely failover the applications that I am responsible of to our secondary servers. There are lots of challenges specially in establishing successful connections with different exchanges from our secondary servers but I am able to resolve them all on that very the same day. I acquired 8 hours overtime just for that day. If I may recall it correctly, it happened Tuesday.

I am super tired already and sleepy by the time I've finished failing over our applications to the secondary datacenter (7:00 AM) but since that week was also my kids' exams week, I needed to extend my sleep time further to 9:00AM because I needed to help review my daughter on her subjects. They aren't able to attend some of their lessons the week that my entire household was infected by Covid that's why I needed to help her catch up with her lessons.

And then on the succeeding days, we have to deal with the after shock effect of the major outage. There were days that I needed to start my shift early or I needed to login before my actual shift because of some issues being escalated by our users. There are still lots of issues that's arising within that outage week but luckily they are just minor ones and we are able to resolve them in a timely manner but then those keeps me so occupied at work. I cannot even scroll my phone during my shift. Admittedly, it's so tiring!..

Up until now, we're still trying to close the gaps that we have identified during the outage day but we're almost done.

It's exhausting yet it is a good opportunity for all of us to experience such level of outage because it's very rare. Never in my 13 years in IT industry did I experienced Datacenter level outage yet and it's same case to almost all of us in the firm.

I am still busy this week, specially because I am still refining our Disaster Recovery documents but it's more manageable now as compared with the previous weeks because our applications are so far stable in the secondary datacenter already.

And that's it!..Hopefully, no further big issues will arise at work so that I would be able to interact with all of you again regularly.

It's almost 3:00 AM now which means I have to go bed already.

Cheers everyone!