Forem: Vinay Hegde

In the Software Industry - Do Titles Matter?

Vinay Hegde — Wed, 27 Dec 2023 15:25:07 +0000

People usually are trained for hierarchy and do not tread beyond theirs, when it comes to decisions. The reasoning here is to ascertain safety in daily work. A similar extension applies to the IT industry as well.

There exists a well-defined structure in most software companies that allows people to expand vertically in their careers. It's generally addressed as climbing up the corporate ladder and flows as follows:

Now I think this is a perfectly valid structure as it allows for clear delegation of roles and responsibilities. It also ensures individuals have ample scope to display the apt team-building and leadership skills at each level as required before moving on to the next one.

But as is the case for a lot of concepts, there exists a counter-point to this one as well. Here, critics often say that a formal structure is a lot of unnecessary bureaucracy, complicates work and encourage flat hierarchies instead. These are wherein one can work anywhere in the above chain but without the "title". Additionally they say leadership is not in the title but more so in actions.

I politely disagree with the counter-point. My oft used example: would we people consider, listen eagerly and be influenced by the opinions of executive leaders like Mark Zuckerburg, Sundar Pichai, Elon Musk, Susan Wojcicki, Padmasree Warrior, Mira Murati if they all were anything else?

Most likely a big No.

On the other hand, we would hardly be aware of the entry-level employees in each of the above leaders's companies let alone know and be influenced by their opinion.

However, my post is not to berate anyone but outline how titles matter. They're vital to let people know who are the decision makers in a formal organisational structure but more importantly why they are so. While with great power comes great responsibility but it gives an individual tremendous influence as well.

This leads me to the interesting question as headlined:

In the Software industry - do titles matter?

Acquisitions - [Jan - May 2022]

Vinay Hegde — Wed, 01 Jun 2022 05:35:10 +0000

Image Credits: Corporate Finance Institute

Hi there! If you're curious what's happening in the tech world around the latest M&A as of May 2022, please continue reading.

January

February

March

April

May

Broadcom buys VMWare for a massive $61 Billion

As most of the world now has been vaccinated against the Covid-19 virus but witnesses armed conflicts, faces economic hardships, layoffs & an existential crisis in some countries, it'd be interesting to notice how these acquisitions shape up. To understand more, I have the following questions for the Dev.to community:

Which of these sides benefits more from these acquisitions & why?
How is it sustainable in a post-pandemic era, especially now Venture Capital funding has reduced or dried up?

Building the Right Platform

Vinay Hegde — Sat, 16 Oct 2021 10:32:28 +0000

In mid-level and big scale organizations, the mission focus is on having continuous innovation backed by stability. The former is required to stay ahead of the curve (being better than one's competitors) while the latter is the springboard to delivery. Thus, a strong platform is an apparent need for every technological company.

Thus, we land upon a concept called Platform Engineering.

So what's it actually?

As per this definition
Platform engineering is the process through which enterprises adopt (new technology and platforms), leverage (existing technologies and platforms), and transform (shift the dial on delivering value by transforming the way things are done) cloud platforms. It is at the core of designing, building, and operating your cloud infrastructure to deliver the next generation IT ecosystem.

While the above definition is accurate, it does not really help understand on the why, what & how to build reliable platforms. Especially for teams who are looking to either augment or revamp their infrastructure from old ways to new.

Therefore, I felt I could contribute by creating one from my know-how so far. For easier understanding, the categories herewith will be structured into the following parameters: why, some points to consider, alternatives.

To build a smooth platform, most e-commerce companies need tooling/tech/processes/workflows in the following categories.

Domains

Cloud Platform

Infrastructure as Code

Version Control

Packaging

CI/CD

Web Services

Databases

Monitoring

Domains

Why?: Branding of one's product, everything on the internet begins with a domain. E.g: google.com, facebook.com, dev.to
Some points to consider?:

Domain pricing / renewals (with ICANN fees)
Whois Privacy
The right name and Top Level Domain or TLD or country-level TLD if it's region specific. (Impacts SEO)

Known tools: Bigrock.in
Alternatives: Namecheap, Route53, Cloudflare, Google Registry

Cloud Platform

Why?: Gateway to the system, having the right infrastructure will be like a strong backbone.
Some points to consider?:

Basic features such as instances/VMs, isolated networks (not everyone will need Kubernetes or Mesos)
Sufficient Capacity for one's enterprise at scale (The last thing one wants in the middle of a frantic user rush is no hardware available)
Multiple accounts with RBAC to distinguish between teams/environments.
Compatibility with Infrastructure-as-Code tools
Effective Pricing.

Known tools: Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Alternatives: Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure Cloud, DigitalOcean, Linode

Infrastructure as Code

Why?: Codifying the infrastructure provisioning and configuration to keep it exact across environments.
Some points to consider?:

Idempotency by changing/deleting infrastructure only once.
Ability to store state locally & remotely.
Should be vender neutral & serve as a crisp log for audit

Known tools: Terraform
Alternatives: Pulumi, AWS Cloudformation, Google Deployment Manager, Azure Resource Manager

Version Control

Why?: Managing codebases with multiple teams across varied projects in different business verticals.
Some points to consider?:

De-centralized (avoids a single point of failure)
Clear history log (for updates/rollback)
Branching/separating strategies.
Ease of setup

Known tools: Git
Alternatives: Mercurial, TFS, SVN

Packaging

Why?: Software should be same across environments. Helps in the CI/CD step and reproduce issues to be fixed quicker
Some points to consider?:

Application storage size (No point in having GB sized containers)
Ability to generate artifacts (if any)

Known tools: Docker
Alternatives: Containerd, LXC, APT, Yum

CI/CD

Why?: To compile/build and deploy software easily. Manual steps can be time-consuming, error-prone and be a bottleneck.
Some points to consider?:

Ability to build/deploy multiple programming languages, frameworks
Support for unit/smoke tests, canary deployments.
Preferably independent than infrastructure (helps avoid vendor lock-in)
Self-hosted vs SaaS (factors here are cost, upgrades and maintenance)

Known tools: Jenkins
Alternatives: Github Actions, Gitlab , CircleCI, TravisCI, ArgoCD

Web-Services

Why?: Helps your userbase access all the consumer endpoints of the system. For e.g: discover, checkout, payments
Some points to consider?:

Scale management (An incorrectly setup web-service can quickly have a cascading effect in case of heavy traffic)
Reverse proxying to one/multiple back-ends and fail-overs (for High Availability)
Support for HTTP/GRPC protocols.
Advanced features such as rate-limits, throttling, IP bans.

Known tools: HAProxy
Alternatives: NGinx, Apache, Ambassador, Envoy, Istio

Databases

Why?: To maintain state of applications and store all data such as inventory, payments and other types of relational information. Helpful for data analytics as well.
Some points to consider?:

ACID Compliance
Libraries/connectors for multiple programming languages.
Storage parameters such as in-memory or persistent to disk.
Ease of backup, recovery in case of DR drills.
Key-value stores for relatively smaller datasets.

Known tools: MySQL or MariaDB
Alternatives: PostgreSQL, MSSQL, MongoDB, Kafka, Aerospike, Redis, Memcached

Monitoring

Why?: A small monitored system will be more reliable than a big one without.
Some points to consider?:

Agents/libraries across multiple programming languages.
Ability to view application/infrastructure metrics.
Retention as per compliance.

Known tools: NewRelic
Alternatives: Datadog, AppSignal, Instana, ElasticAPM

TL;DR: While this is not a definitive list of things that's required to build a system but there's a good chance this blog post provides an entrypoint for you to begin with

What are some pointers you would consider to build a reliable, consistent and easy-to-use platform?

Automating Windows Setup via Chocolatey

Vinay Hegde — Sun, 25 Jul 2021 17:21:10 +0000

When you're a software professional, 1 thing you must've dreaded is setting up a new Windows machine (as in a development environment). This might be as the setup either needs downloading multiple .MSI / .EXE files of the required applications or using the Microsoft App Store to install (personally I believe it's a little off the mark compared to the Linux/MacOS).

It's also compounded by the fact Windows systems are regarded relatively volatile so we never re-touch/re-configure applications once installed. You also must've surely wondered why Windows trails Linux/Mac OS when it comes to Command Line. Agreed, PowerShell changes most of that but learning a new syntax can be a little harrowing.

What if I told you this could be solved permanently via CLI? Enter Chocolatey to the rescue.

Chocolatey is a package manager specifically designed to solve these very problems for Windows OS. Consider it equivalent to apt, dnf or brew that'll ease work considerably, so much that you might never go back to tedious manual methods again.

Prerequisites:

Understanding how Powershell policies work such as Set-ExecutionPolicy, here is an excellent page to get you started.
From the Chocolatey official page
- Windows 7+ / Windows Server 2003+
- PowerShell v2+ (Not PowerShell Core, minimum is v3)
- .NET Framework 4+ (installation attempts to install .NET 4.0 if absent, minimum is v4.5 due to TLS v1.2)
Excitement to learn something new and preferably a cup of tea/coffee.

Steps:

Follow this link to install Chocolatey.
If you get the below error, then install PowerShell v7.3 using this and then repeat the previous step.

Once the install completes, you should be able to execute choco --version.

And that's all when you prefer the vanilla install but if you like to dive deeper, you'll quickly realize a few concerns.

How can we install specific versions of software as needed?
What if we wanted to install multiple applications in 1 go, uninterrupted?
Can we rollout to multiple machines? (Note: some features for this point may need Chocolatey enterprise, please read the documentation as per your use-cases)

Lets answer the 1st two questions.

Number 1 is pretty simple, you just execute choco install vlc={version} and relax. Number 2 can be a little bit tricky but a handy way is to use the Packages.config which is an XML file containing the list of applications we want to install.

Now the command becomes choco install {path-to-file.config} --yes

Here is a sample that you can use or create one/more referring it as per your requirements. You can also keep it under version control to have an audit for changes.

Result?

On a fresh Windows 10 machine before this, it took me 2-3 hours to download & install the exes with atleast 70+ clicks (mostly clicking Next on GUI installers😛)

Now it took me ~35 minutes, which could be even lesser once we've the .config files ready as mentioned above.

Hope this guide helps you save time/effort similarly.

What are the ways you use to setup Windows environments?

Migrating Applications from VMs to K8s

Vinay Hegde — Fri, 16 Apr 2021 15:48:40 +0000

This article was originally published on BookMyShow Engineering

A brief post explaining our efforts towards a more modular platform.

If you’ve followed the infrastructure ecosystem for a while, you might’ve come across different ways to manage applications via terms like Containers & Orchestration. A quick Google search will then lead you to technologies like Docker, Kubernetes, Mesos, LXC, Helm Charts, etc... These are touted as the next big things in the inter-sectional worlds of DevOps/SRE as they can help fix a lot of problems when done the right way.

So, what is this all about?

While the BookMyShow platform already has Kubernetes running in production for the last 3+ years for the majority of its microservices but 1 thing missing was widespread adoption by engineering teams.

Some frontends, APIs, scheduled jobs were still functioning from Linux Virtual Machines or VMs with very little awareness on them, running on autopilot mode (due to development for certain projects being stopped)

Why did we need this?

VMs limit auto-scaling of systems during high traffic (Think big movie/event releases) as its bootstrapping takes a while.
They also have issues like certain packages/configs setup manually, periodic problems in relaying logs (disk space alerts anyone?) and finally in most use-cases, were over-provisioned.
This would help standardize the application build/deployment & maintenance life-cycle by requiring efforts only on a single platform.

How is it setup?

At BookMyShow, we use Docker to build Docker images pushed into an internal registry, Bamboo to build these applications in a CI pipeline with detailed visibility & audit logs, Helm to maintain those apps into Charts. A custom wrapper script then takes the Helm charts & deploys them into Kubernetes clusters.

This script also injects a list of necessary parameters like ENV variables based on the environment, NewRelic, and/or Elastic APM config to provide application monitoring & Coralogix for logs. It also adds few parameters related to Kubernetes (smart defaults) such as replicaCount, HPA, keepSecrets while the rest of it (CPU/Memory limits) can be configured in the individual Helm charts as & when required.

Challenges Faced and Fixed

What's any migration without challenges? While the majority of transitions from VMs to Kubernetes were done smoothly, there was lot of additional knowledge we acquired on the way. Here's a brief list of them

NodeJS applications do not respect resource limits and instead consider host compute resources. For e.g: If a Kubernetes Worker Node has 16 CPU(s) and a NodeJS app is deployed as is, it'll start and spawn 16 worker processes. This causes a severe performance impact if we have CPU usage limits for it while starving other apps of the required CPU. Our findings led us to this that we implemented as an ENV Variable to be defined per app than hard-coding it to a specific number.
Applications showing relative slowness post the migration was another one that was tackled by setting the appropriate timeouts on certain datastores like Redis. Reviewing the Redis Documentation for TCP-Keepalives and Client Timeouts among others helped us identify and rollout a fix quickly.

The Result?

Right after the migrations

We leveraged Kubernetes to ensure the appropriate resource limits for each app, auto-scaling up & down only when necessary via Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA)
Another benefit was freeing up much needed computing capacity (approximately 25% savings) required for other use-cases.
All of this with built-in logging/monitoring, streamlined deployments & move towards the famous Infrastucture should be cattle not pets

While Kubernetes is known to be complex with multiple moving parts and has a steep learning curve, it certainly eases the aforementioned issues if implemented correctly.

We hope our learnings through this post guide you one step closer towards a more modular infrastructure, do watch this space for more such experiences. In the meanwhile, you can also follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn

Thanks to the helpful insights from the BookMyShow Site Reliability Engineering Team

Curious to solve problems like these? Come join us onboard at BookMyShow - India’s premier platform for everything in entertainment.

Infrastructure Access for Feature teams?

Vinay Hegde — Sun, 14 Mar 2021 14:20:40 +0000

When it comes to access, a recent trend observed is having a self-serve tooling platforms for engineering and non-tech teams. This is to facilitate debugging during production issues, run background jobs or sometimes take a database backup by the said teams themselves and/or compliment the SRE teams.

Now, IAM - Identity Access Management was spawned with similar problem statements in mind and apparently proves useful. But while managing its infrastructure at scale (think of orgs with 250+ people across development, product, data-science, design etc..), it can be a constant hassle. This not only slows down genuine feature building but can cause friction among teams if there's too little or too much process around it.

While most people are careful with their privilege when it comes to production but it's only a matter of time before one right command on the wrong environment (unintentional or not) can cause all sorts of panic, ad-hoc debugging and restoration to fix arising outages.

There are concepts like least privilege, single sign-ons, SSH keys, and RBAC that are battle tested and newer ones like Zerotrust that might end up creating more problems than they solve, if used incorrectly. On the other hand, denying access proves to be counter productive since teams need to rely on others to get vital information they could've obtained themselves.

Therefore the million dollar question that comes up is:

How do you think Dev/Design/Product Teams should access the Infrastructure?

Acquisitions - [Sep - Dec 2020]

Vinay Hegde — Sat, 02 Jan 2021 11:38:52 +0000

In case you missed the M&A tidbits of August, please check out the previous article in this series.

The remainder of 2020 had multiple blockbuster acquisitions that we will cover in the final post of this series.

September

October

November

December

As the world eagerly awaits vaccine roll-outs to address the Covid-19 crisis, it'd be interesting to notice how such activities shape up. To understand more about this, I have the following questions for the Dev.to community:

Which of these sides benefits from these acquisitions & why?
How is it sustainable in a post-pandemic era?

That's a wrap-up for this series and the year 2020. Wishing all of you a very Happy New Year 2021.

Acquisitions - [August 2020]

Vinay Hegde — Fri, 04 Sep 2020 18:45:34 +0000

In case you missed the M&A tidbits of July, please check out the previous article in this series.

August 2020 didn't seem to have too many noteworthy acquisitions so this post got delayed 🙏! However, a quick review recently did spin up a few anecdotes so here we go for this month.

As the world slowly limps back to normalcy from the Covid-19 crisis, it'd be noteworthy to observe how such activities pan out. To understand more about this, I have the following questions for the Dev.to community:

Which of these 2 sides would benefit from such acquisitions & why?
How is it sustainable in a post-pandemic era full of drastic changes?

Effects of Covid-19

Vinay Hegde — Sun, 19 Jul 2020 14:47:18 +0000

This post isn't to sound pessimistic or in the tone of doomsday like scenarios but more of an observational one collated from my experiences. With people gradually coming to terms with this pandemic being the new normal, it's also an attempt to engage with fellow developers like you to understand the mindsets, rationale, and viewpoints behind it.

Let me begin listing of the effects of the pandemic, broadly bucketed into 3 categories.

Ugly

Many organizations simply didn't have a Business Continuity Plan or were in no shape, or had the resources and expertise to develop one.
This led to inhumane pay cuts/layoffs/furloughs/no increments en masse for conglomerates with decades of industry experience and start-ups alike.
Even if the pandemic subsides and/or a cure is found, more of the above will be the new norm in due course of time. Additionally, it'll be cited as the reason for any & almost everything.
Companies eager to get back on track will resume operations on a frantic note wherein they'll have employees working long hours leading to issues like mental burnout, stress & other lifestyle disorders.
Military and humanitarian crises will exponentially rise if better disaster management practices are not formulated.

Bad

Organizations will re-think their expenditure on workspaces, leases, rents, and mortgages thus encouraging more Work from Home.
This will lead to severe problems for the real-estate industry due to declining revenues. Similarly, some establishments across other sectors such as travel, food, offline entertainment will be knocked offline forever.
Remote work as the new regular can have more occurrences of internet connectivity issues, power outages, software/hardware failures, too many meetings/calls for daily routine.
Thereby, work-life balance will be affected since many people tend not to adhere to a strict schedule/discipline. People in countries with strict lockdowns could start feeling isolated.
Economic damage across the globe has been unprecedented and may take decades to recover.

And finally like the proverbial dessert, here's the good

Good

Healthcare stands to be given topmost priority.
In crisis lie many opportunities so a multitude of ventures, start-ups & acquisitions will spring up to solve innumerable problems for the new needs of the world's population.
E-Commerce will boom towards newer highs since more people will now order essentials online.
Companies with sound principles will more likely be empathetic towards their employees to provide benefits such as remote work, flexible timings, better healthcare provisions and morale.
People will value blessings such as health, finances, and interpersonal relationships even more than ever before.

What are some of the effects you think will this Covid pandemic have?

Acquisitions - [July 2020]

Vinay Hegde — Fri, 10 Jul 2020 17:57:54 +0000

In case you missed the M&A tidbits of June, please check out the previous article in this series.

We continue the journey of Acquisitions across the technology world in the July 2020 edition with more examples. Most of you might be already aware of these by now.

While occurrences like these were never new but it'd be noteworthy to observe how they pan out in a world that has been shaken to its very foundations recently. To understand more about this, I have the following questions for the Dev.to community:

Which of these 2 sides would benefit from such acquisitions & why?
How is it sustainable in a post-Covid era full of drastic changes?

Acquisitions - [June 2020]

Vinay Hegde — Sun, 14 Jun 2020 08:39:34 +0000

In case you missed the M&A tidbits of May, please check out the previous article in this series.

We continue the journey of Acquisitions across the technology world in the June 2020 edition with more examples. Most of you might be already aware of these by now.

Which of these 2 sides would benefit from such acquisitions & why?
How is it sustainable in a post-Covid era full of drastic changes?

Acquisitions - [May 2020]

Vinay Hegde — Sat, 16 May 2020 19:52:02 +0000

I'm sure most of you might be already aware by now, but I recently read about a few articles on investments/mergers/partnerships across the technology world.

This is now becoming a routine trend but it'd be noteworthy to observe how these acquisitions pan out in a world that has been shaken to its very foundations. To understand more about this, I have the following questions for the Dev.to community:

Which of these 2 sides would benefit from such acquisitions & why?
How is it sustainable in a post-Covid era full of drastic changes?