This week I went on call for the first time at Acquia and it was actually a lot of fun. As a Cloud Engineer, I’m on the escalation path for issues with our Amazon services – an example would be something goes wrong with an Amazon instance, I put in the ticket to Amazon customer support and handle its resolution.
What’s fantastic is that we have 24 hour support, but I am only on call during my work hours. Our support shifts and on call rotation “follow the sun.” I have colleagues on my team who work in Europe and Australia. In the morning (from my perspective) my European colleague passes the shift to me, and in the evening I pass the shift to my Australian colleague. Neat!
One of my buddies on the team is taking a vacation that happened to have an on call week right in the middle. I am enjoying it so much that I volunteered to take his shift. Looking forward to getting more exposure to the “hot seat” – so far so good!