Devin Drawhorn

I joined Boost Mobile's Cloud Services team three months before the completion of an effort to build a new 5G network covering 20% of the US population. Over the following year, the network would expand to cover over 70% of the population. My original focus in all of this was supporting a suite of common networking automation constructs, including VPC and Subnet provisioning. I also developed automation to create a batch of AWS Accounts in our Control Tower from a single request, rather than having to request each Account one at a time.

As Boost transitioned to operating the network instead of building it, my priorities became focused on the governance of our AWS Accounts. Now leading a team of engineers, I designed automation for enforcing our FinOps and Security best practices using Cloud Custodian. After deploying that solution to Production, our AWS billing decreased over $1 million over the next year.

The next chapter is expanding our teams' mindset and tools to all of EchoStar's brands, as Boost Mobile's Cloud Services team proved we could do just that. My contributions include not only the Cloud Custodian solution already metioned, but also tools for AWS resource inventory visibility, an automated solution for regular EC2 patching with SSM, and more that I won't list here. In addition, we're evaluating how we can best use GenAI in our existing and new toolsets.

My first six month rotation was on the Cloud Automation team where I fell in love with working with cloud technologies. I used Terraform to deploy Lambda functions that enforced policies such as S3 disaster recovery replication and proper logging for load balancers, CDNs, and firewalls. I also created a command line utility that simplified running boto3 scripts across multiple accounts.

I then spent rotations on a frontend development team, the Performance Engineering team, and a fullstack development team. While I learned a lot (including many of the libraries and concepts of this website), I always wanted to come back to the Cloud. As a member of the EKS team, I helped manage common Terraform modules, Jenkins pipelines, and set up FluxCD and ArgoCD for operations and applications GitOps respectively.

The VIN Diesel team was working on a company-wide initiative that left their backlog all but ignored. After showing my strengths and work ethic, I was allowed to take just about any ticket from that backlog and run with it, something I love doing. I not only got to work with .NET and C#, but also learned just how important elements such as company culture and team camaraderie were to my success.

The Data Platform team was my first Agile sprint team, which meant I was learning a new process of working in addition to completely new technologies such as Avro, Kafka, and Hadoop. By the end of the internship, my teammate and I had added several features to a supporting application that increased the user experience of the platform as a whole.

As a summer intern, I was brought onto the Academic Technology team to help update and migrate a catalog of Tomcat apps to new servers. Once I got comfortable with the technologies in their tech stack, I gained more responsibilities and ultimately earned a co-op position as a web developer.