Hi there 👋

When I joined Splunk in 2015, I was quickly tasked with reviving a twice-failed initiative — the creation of a shared component strategy for the core product. At the time, the product was growing rapidly, but also becoming increasingly bloated and monolithic. Feature teams were innovating, but in silos, leading to duplicated code, inconsistent operations, and mounting technical debt. To keep scaling, we needed a way to build once and reuse across domains — especially as new products like ITSM and SIEM started to share similar analytical needs....

At Splunk, cloud sales teams faced a recurring nightmare — not that customers wouldn’t buy, but that we couldn’t fulfill what they purchased. The issue wasn’t demand. It was execution. Despite having invested heavily in elasticity and declarative configuration, order fulfillment remained brittle. The result? Delayed activations, broken provisioning flows, and in some quarters, missed revenue targets — not for lack of product-market fit, but due to gaps in automation and process....

In earlier posts, we discussed how Splunk Cloud evolved from a stateful monolith into an elastic, cloud-native platform. But elasticity alone wasn’t enough. A lingering Achilles’ heel remained — configuration management. Splunk’s on-prem model split cluster configuration across three major roles: ingestion, indexing, and search. Admins managed these settings manually, often SSHing into servers to copy or update config files. While workable in customer-controlled environments, this model completely broke down in the cloud....

The behavioral question, “How do you handle conflict?” has become a staple in engineering interviews. While it’s tempting to give a simple answer about being agreeable, that misses the point entirely. At the senior levels of engineering, conflict isn’t something to be avoided; it’s a catalyst. Disagreements, when managed correctly, are the crucibles where the strongest, most resilient technical solutions are forged. My approach isn’t about finding a middle ground or ensuring everyone leaves happy....

At Splunk, our transition from a customer-hosted, on-premise model to a cloud-native architecture brought fundamental challenges — both technical and cultural. One of the earliest and most pressing concerns was infrastructure cost. As a company historically dependent on customers provisioning their own compute, we faced a steep learning curve in operating and scaling workloads efficiently in the cloud. Meanwhile, competitors were already cloud-native — built from the ground up for elasticity and low operational overhead....

While at Splunk, transitioning a monolithic on-premise product into a scalable, multi-tenant cloud platform was a transformative engineering endeavor. Among the most complex and impactful areas of change was our approach to Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD). The legacy model: manual, ticket-based, and weeks-long; was incompatible with the velocity required for cloud-native innovation. The Problem 1. Manual Releases Bottleneck Innovation Our release process was fragmented and painfully slow. A typical release cycle involved:...

A new day, and with it, new possibilities. I was especially excited to see the full-scale replica of the goddess Athena statue housed in the Parthenon at Centennial Park. As had become our routine, we started the day with a light breakfast and drove the short 2.5 miles to the park. At first, we were puzzled—there didn’t seem to be a clear entrance to the Parthenon. We almost gave up, thinking it might be closed, but decided to walk the grounds anyway....

I woke up feeling a little wistful—it was time to leave the camp that had become our cozy home for the past two days. But before we said our final goodbyes, we had room for just a bit more adventure in the Smokies. Figure 1: Saying goodbyes, Under Canvas, Smokies NP I suggested Grotto Falls, and the ever-helpful concierge gave it a nod of approval. That morning, I swapped out the bottomless coffee for something with a little more homegrown flair: Wagh Bakri chai, Mitu’s trusty travel staple....

I had a head full of dreams and sleep still clinging to my eyes when Nidhi nudged me It’s already 5:45! I leapt out of bed, chasing visions of bears and strong morning coffee as we hit the road for our early hike in the Smokies. By 6:30 AM, we rolled past the Cades Cove Visitor Center, only to see a line of cars already queuing up. The loop here is a well known 11-mile one way scenic drive through wide Tennessee meadows, dotted with historic cabins and country churches more than a century old....

Nashville seemed like the perfect mid-year escape when our neighbor Mitu floated the idea. Our travels along the East Coast have been, well… let’s just say, a bit lacking, and the thought of glamping in the Smokies had just the right amount of rustic charm and modern comfort to win us over. In my usual fast-fingered fashion, I booked flights on United before noticing that Delta was offering nearly $900 in savings (that’s no pocket change!...