Who we are
We are the admins of Thomann Bits & Beats. We are currently a team of six and make sure Thomann and the many accompanying ships sail smoothly. We ensure that the engine of the Thomann web shop purrs like a kitten, and together with the Dev Teams, we constantly provide the Thomann fleet with updates through our CI/CD pipelines, while also working on new technologies to make Thomann even faster and better.
What we do and where we are
From our office in Erlangen, remotely from home or from one of the data centers in Nuremberg, we manage the infrastructure in the Thomann universe - ranging from the Thomann web shop and websites of the Thomann brands to forums and blogs for musicians. In addition to several VMware clusters and racks upon racks of physical servers, we run several OpenShift clusters. We maintain, manage and update the back end for PHP applications (from web shops to brand pages to internal tooling), XenForo forums and Wordpress blogs. We manage MySQL, Percona databases and Solr clusters and monitor with Check_MK, Prometheus, Grafana, Splunk and Vector. We automate with Helm, Argo CD, Drone CI, Jenkins, Ansible, Puppet, Golang and Bash scripts, authenticate with Keycloak and store secrets with Vault.
What it’s like to work with us
Due to the wide range of tools and applications, each of us has their individual focus areas within the team. Yet everyone is involved in all areas up to a certain extent. In addition to our passion for IT and technology in general, everyone in the team shares the mission "to create the most inspiring shopping experience for musicians" – just like all of our colleagues at Thomann.
Simon (System Administrator)
Your best Ops Team moment?
The OpenShift user meeting in Salzburg, Germany. What makes the Ops Team unique? The open and relaxed team culture. Memorable conversations at Friday lunch. What is still missing from the Ops Team? A firewall mastermind!
Steven (DevOps Engineer)
Your best Ops Team moment?
When we found the solution during our breakout-room team event by using bruteforce in the last seconds. What makes the Ops Team unique? Small company feeling. What is still missing for the Ops Team? Birthday cakes in summer :-)
And what would our band look like?
Our admin band would be called Mr. Kernel & the Server Monkeys or Downtime Decapitation ;-) The genre would be something between progressive technical death grind and progressive atmospheric synth wave punk with a strong focus on modem dial-up samples. Stefan blasts the drums, Wolfgang slaps the bass guitar, Vladimir screams the lyrics, Andy hammers the Hammond organ, Simon and Steven shred the guitar. The first single would definitely be ":explosion: :ultrafastparrot:" from the album "500 Internal Server Error".
