A Magical Morning in Our Cave Hotel Waking up in Santorini is like waking up inside a postcard, but with better WiFi. Our hotel room? A cozy cave on a cliff, because who needs regular walls when you can have rocks? Natural light poured in from the door facing the west, teasing us with views of the Caldera that are too stunning to be real. At 6 AM, instead of hitting snooze, we were on WhatsApp, showing off our cliffside abode to family and friends back home....

A vacation for me? It’s like a coffee shot of espresso on a Monday morning - absolutely essential! Flights of Fancy and Not-so-Fancy Figure 1: Economy Sandwich After what felt like a mini-lifetime (~14 hours to be exact), we landed at Istanbul airport, and without skipping a beat, jumped onto our next flight to Athens. The flight meal was typical - an adventure in culinary minimalism. I chose the AVML (Asian Vegetarian Meal), which was basically an Indian feast at 30,000 feet....

This series of posts explores the intriguing challenges I’ve encountered throughout my career. Today, I’m excited to share a pivotal chapter: spearheading compliance for Splunk Cloud’s multi-tenant services, covering SOC2, HIPAA, ISO, and PCI standards. Back in 2019, we had developed around 20 multi-tenant Splunk Cloud services to enhance the existing, monolithic Splunk solution. Despite their innovative capabilities, these services operated from a single region and lacked essential compliance certifications. This absence was a significant barrier, precluding these services from being integrated into customer cloud solutions and halting numerous product launches that relied on these new services....

This series of posts explores the intriguing challenges I’ve faced in my career. Today, I’ll discuss a significant hurdle: transforming Splunk’s single-tenant architecture to support multi-tenancy, a feature our competitors leveraged to share resources cost-effectively. The initial problem was clear: running Splunk docker containers in the cloud was prohibitively expensive for smaller customer workloads. Given that Splunk clusters are inherently large, creating a small cluster was still financially burdensome for our customers....

In the ever-evolving landscape of web development, the journey from concept to live site is fraught with challenges. As the curator of what I envisioned as a “simple” blog, I’ve navigated through this terrain using a toolkit composed of several key technologies: Domain Name Registrar: Namecheap Code Repository Vendor: GitHub Web Hosting Vendor: Cloudflare However, even with this arsenal at my disposal, I recently encountered a snag that left my users facing a less-than-stellar web experience....

This blog post is part of a series exploring the fascinating challenges I’ve encountered throughout my career. Originally, the Splunk codebase was designed for on-premises installations, requiring manual setup via “tarball” on multiple data center machines. This approach demanded thorough knowledge of specific configurations and was notably time-consuming, especially for cloud deployments which could extend over weeks for each customer. Moreover, Splunk’s development engineers lacked familiarity with the complexities involved in cloud setup and operation, leaving such tasks to dedicated cloud teams....

I’ve navigated some intriguing challenges in my career, gaining invaluable insights along the way. I’m excited to unveil these experiences in a new blog series, where I’ll delve into the obstacles I encountered, the strategies I employed to overcome them, and the outcomes of those efforts. In 2015, I joined Splunk at a time when the company was experiencing rapid growth, overflowing with innovative ideas, and attracting a significant influx of new customers....

I’m currently navigating the exciting journey of potentially co-founding a startup, grounded in my rich background as a software engineering leader. My passion lies in steering tech teams toward achieving their most ambitious dreams, all while fostering a culture of joy and collaboration. This is made possible through my knack for broadening perspectives on projects, making them more accessible and engaging for everyone involved. With a track record of building robust platforms, spearheading projects, and nurturing team growth across both sprawling corporations and nimble startups, my approach is holistic....

I’ve started reading Sapiens, by Yuval Noah Harari. It is an absorbing and gripping read. Yuval is to the point, and the objectivity is refreshing. Complex language is our biggest invention: Compared to the rest of living species on Earth, our language is the most nuanced and complex. We can describe situations, events, reality in most rich and nuanced ways. Not only that, we use language to connect intimately with our peers....

There is truth in the stone, for the stone is here; and no power in the world, no god, no man, no demon, can destroy its existence. But the stone has no consciousness. There is truth in the plant and its life can expand; the plant grows and blossoms and bears fruit. Its beauty is marvelous, but it has no consciousness. There is truth in the animal; it moves about and perceives its surroundings; it distinguishes and learns to choose....