Microsoft Corporation

In my summer of 2023 co-op work term placement, I worked in the Acquire Lease team apart of the Cloud Operations + Innovation (COI) organization at Microsoft. COI powers Azure, and Acquire Lease team is responsible for optimizing the business processes behind acquiring new power capacity through leasing data centers.

Engineering Excellence

During my employment at Microsoft, I was tasked to eliminate security risks in Acquire Lease applications, presented in telemetry data instrumentation dependencies that were on their deprecation path due to use of decomissioned libraries and lack of maintenance. I was required to migrate telemtry data instrumentation to an open-source industry standard, OpenTelemetry.

In my design, I avoided any telemetry data downtime, additional to deployment downtime, through adding new OpenTelmetry implementation to work alongside existing implementation. This has helped me achieve zero telemetry data loss, and in addition eased my end-to-end testing process by having access to both implementation outputs for the same data.

Working on this project was a great learning opportunity, as I needed to quickly ramp up on several new technologies, including C#, .NET framework and Azure Cloud Services, and align with my team's development processes.

Business Problem Automation

For the second part of my work term, I was tasked to automate new data center power capacity requirement ingestion into Acquire Lease applications. This required me to deliver a system integration with another team's application used to send those requirements, which presented cross-functional collaboration opportunities with different stakeholders.

Requirements for this task were not yet finalized, which presented design challenges as requirements could change any time during my implementation. To address this problem, I worked closely with the technical PM to scope my project and deliver an adaptive product to changing requirements in a timely manner.

In this project, I further developed my skills in Azure Cloud Services as I utilized a pub/sub approach to listening to new events, using Service Bus Queue and function app event triggers. I also learnt a new set of technologies including the Microsoft Power Platform, creating CRM applications on Dynamics 365.

My Experience

During my employment at Microsoft, I was exposed to many design patterns and techniques widely used in the industry to maintain resilient and robust production-level applications.

I practiced implementing SOLID design patterns in my day-to-day development to deliver higher quality code. Being conscious of these patterns, engaging the team in design review sessions before implementation, and aligning with finalized designs, has helped deliver a cost-effective compliant platform as I progressed through my internship.

Working with clients, product managers, and other engineers, I learnt valuable project initiation skills, including efficient requirement gathering, project scoping, system architecture design, and design review session planning, which helped me deliver an aligned and impactful product.

During my work term, I got a chance to attend many developer events including Microsoft Build 2023, allowing to expand my network, learn from other engineers' experiences, and learn about new Microsoft technology advances and industry trends.

My internship at Microsoft was a great experience that helped me further develop my technical expertise and soft skills required to move forward towards leading a successful software engineering career. Looking back, I am grateful to experiencing this opportunity and exceeding my learning expectations from my internship.

Acknowledgement

Thank you to my manager Pradhumna Bhosale and my mentor Jalpa Ashara, who both helped me quickly adjust to Microsoft's work environment and development practices. I would also like to thank Acquire Lease's technical PM, Vinod Sharma, for helping me understand the business processes' we power through our applications, and for helping gather and understand the requirements for my projects.

Finally, thank you to my team for being so welcoming and helpful with any questions I had troughout my journey at Microsoft!