DevCentral's Featured Member for April - Mayur Sutare
Our Featured Member series is a way for us to show appreciation and highlight active contributors in our community. Communities thrive on interaction and our Featured Series gives you some insight on some of our most engaged folks. First time DevCentral MVP Mayur Sutare is our Featured Member for April! Let's learn more about Mayur!
DevCentral: First, please explain to the DC community a little about yourself, what you do and why it is important.
Mayur: Hello everyone! I am Mayur. Currently working for ZS Associates. Because of the interest built up during my college days, I choose to work in the Network domain. I enjoy working with various Network & Security devices/platforms. I love to play around SSL/TLS, Ciphers, F5 iRules, policies & profiles. I am always eager to learn new things related to Network & Security domain and read blogs around it. In my free time, I like to watch movies, listening to music & spending time with family and friends.
DevCentral: You’ve continued to be an active contributor in the DevCentral community. What keeps you involved?
Mayur: As F5 DevCentral is one of the most active community, I joined it to learn new things, connect with people and grow. This keeps me engaged with the community. To be honest, I have learned a lot through the articles, code & questions and still learning.
DevCentral: Tell us a little about the technical expertise you have.
Mayur: I started my career as a Core Network Engineer in 2015. Initially started with configuring the Cisco switches and handling issues around it, gradually I got chance to work on firewalls, web-proxy, wireless and F5s. I have been actively working on F5 devices, Palo Alto, Checkpoint firewalls, Cisco R&S. Currently I am learning APIs, Python to get expertise around it.
DevCentral: You are a Senior Network & Security Administrator at ZS. Can you describe your typical workday, how you manage work/life balance and the strong support of F5 solutions? How has the recent pandemic impacted your work?
Mayur: Currently I am doing WFH since a year now and managing work as well as personal life well. I get decent amount of time to spend with family and friends post my office hours. In my current role, I am part of the team who manages the operations, troubleshooting and deployment part of Network and Security. I work upon the issues, tickets. Apart from that I also fulfills the new solutions, deployments depending upon the requirements/needs. Also managing the network & security devices upgrades, new improvements to be done in the security policies, threat management etc when required. During off time (mostly weekends), I also focus on my skills improvement, reading technical stuffs and setting up the firewall and F5 labs for testing the different scenarios.
DevCentral: Do you have any F5 Certifications? If so, why are these important to you and how have they helped with your career?
Mayur: I do not have F5 certification but its in my to-do list this year. Last year, I had completed few other certifications related to other security products. Now this year, I am looking forward to F5 certification. Doing certifications gives me more confidence in particular technology and definitely it helps to expand knowledge about the solution/product.
Describe one of your biggest Customer challenges and how the community helped in that situation.
Mayur: Recently I was working on the project where we wanted to have a pair of F5 VE instances and Palo Alto firewalls on cloud. Being each instance in separate availability zone, initially we had few issues while building the F5 HA failover. I got few helpful articles on the community. Also few of our MVPs helped me to successfully build it.
DevCentral: Lastly, if you weren’t doing what you’re doing – what would be your dream career? Or better, when you were a kid – what did you want to be when you grew up?
Mayur: To be honest, I wanted to be a Chartered Accountant when I was in school. This is because I had seen few CA around me who were working on the computers and at that age, I was very fond of computers. At later stages, I got interest in engineering field and during my engineering, I found interest in Networking.
---Thanks Mayur! We really appreciate your willingness to share with the DevCentral Community. Stay connected with Mayur and ZS Associates on social media: