A day in the life: Matías Saracusti, far away but always present

What is your job? How would you explain it to a toddler, for example? 

 I am a freelance consultant working for the UN and I specialize in Azure Cloud & DevOps. 

Azure is a cloud computing platform and an online portal that allows you to access and manage cloud services and resources provided by Microsoft. These services and resources include storing and transforming your data, depending on the client’s requirements. 

The Azure cloud platform has more than 200 products and cloud services designed to help you bring new solutions to life—to solve today's challenges and create the future. 

Inside the Azure Cloud, I take care of everything the client might need, such as infrastructure, monitoring, certificates, DNS, networking, and so on. 

To meet all requirements, I am also working with Azure DevOps which is an end-to-end software development platform that offers an assortment of capabilities intended to organize and accelerate development efforts across the entire application lifecycle. 

In addition, with Azure DevOps I am using Terraform which is an infrastructure-as-code software tool that is used to deploy a new infra, perform a configuration, and even make changes to something already deployed.  

Once the code is published with Terraform, I deploy this code into Azure by using the pipelines from Azure DevOps, which automatically build and test code projects into the Cloud. 

What are the green flags of being a consultant that convinced you to become one? 

Before starting to work for the UN, I always worked on the payroll, which involved not only commuting to the office but also, I had to comply with certain schedules, arrangements, and other responsibilities such as working for long hours without the possibility of enjoying time with my family and friends. 

That is why I decided to start working as a consultant where I can work remotely from anywhere and I can dedicate more time to spend with my family.  

I have been working in the IT world for more than 16 years, working not only in different companies and areas, having the chance to get to know a lot of people and cultures. 

My goal is to continue improving my experience working as a freelancer so that one day I can have my own consultancy company through which I can offer Cloud and IT solutions to different companies and people. 

Matías and Azure: a match made in heaven? 

I do not know whether ours is a match made in heaven, but I can say since I started working with Azure 5 years ago, I have been able to improve my skills and broaden my scope in the technology field so as to offer better solutions to the clients. 

In this ongoing learning process, I also want to start gaining knowledge in other Clouds such as Google Cloud and AWS so that I can offer my assistance to many more people in this constantly changing technology world. 

If Azure was a person, would you like them?

It is hard to imagine this, but in a way, it would be like a friend, who you meet and discuss different topics with. Sometimes you might agree and at others, you just share different approaches or points of view. 

What do you do when you’re stuck on a problem you can’t solve? 

First, I try to dig deeply and get answers from different pages and forums on the Internet, and then I may ask my teammates or my lead for assistance.  

Even though I got used to working alone, it is always an enriching experience having a team you can rely on and being able not only to help but also to ask for assistance any time you need it.  

What is your daily routine at work? 

As I am working for the UN in Valencia, and I am living now in Argentina, I have an early start, at 7:00 am (which is 11 am or 12 pm in Spain depending on the season), so I can work with my team for a certain amount of time. I usually take a break for lunch at 14:00 (which is 18:00 or 19:00 in Spain) and my team finishes their shift. Then, I continue working until 16:00 in my country. 

Afterwards, I can have some free time to spend with my family. This is one of the advantages of working as a freelancer.  

Also, I can work from home or another place, without having to commute to an office. 

What is your worst habit at work? 

Sometimes I try to look for a better solution when the solution is already there. Then, I realise I should dedicate this precious time to other issues. I am trying to internalize this in order to apply the solution and not waste time.  

Tell us about something you can’t stand when working on a project. 

It has happened to me that working on different projects, the clients have plenty of requirements, and in many cases, there are certain rules and policies we need to follow to comply with the company standards or the processes themselves. Sometimes it is hard to come to an agreement with the client about the different courses of action to make the infrastructure work, so it is not easy to explain to the client why we are implementing a different approach.  

What is a tool you can’t live without? It can’t be Azure! 

Since the moment I started working with Terraform, I realised that everything is much easier and quicker to implement with it. I want to keep improving my knowledge of this tool because it is the one that will help me implement different courses of action in a short period of time. 

The piece of advice that changed your life? 

Sometimes, it gets difficult to set some balance between life and work, there is a saying I usually mention, to work for a living and not just live for work. You should prioritize things in your life, and in my case, they are my wife, my daughter, and my boy who is coming soon.  

Because of them being my priority, I quit working on the payroll and commuting to the office and started working as a freelancer, so I could work from home all the time. Always try to strike a balance in your life and seize all the precious time.  

The last thing that made you proud at work? 

Working for the UN gives me the possibility to keep improving my knowledge and skills every day. As we are working with different clients, they have their own space in Azure and different policies to apply, therefore, for me, it is great because I am working with different things every day. 

Why choose Ekkiden as a partner to walk the consulting path? 

I was looking for a position with the opportunity to work with a consultancy firm that offered me this consultant role as an Azure Cloud Engineer. Since the first interview I had, I realised the dedication, responsibility, and willingness people showed and how they offered me to be a part of it, being patient and helping me with all kinds of doubts. I am happy with my choice. 

If you are not Matías the consultant, who are you? What do you enjoy doing? 

I love spending time with my family and friends whenever I can. Going out for a walk, taking my daughter to a park or going for a cup of coffee.  I enjoy listening to music and watching TV Series and movies.