Surya Prakash Jayanti

I used to work for Satyam computers between 2004-2007. Head of the unit was called AIC - Associate in Charge that means he is responsible for Associate, Investor, Customer. What happened to Satyam was a different story, but what I want to talk about today is Loyalty. Don't tell me the quote, get a dog if you want loyalty, tigers doesn't work for loyalty. We will focus on the concept of Loyalty in terms of AIC (Associate, Investor, Customer). Lot of companies focused on customer loyalty. The culture and principles of these companies are fully focused on customer loyalty only. Investors are happy because of the growth and you got lot of long term investors. The only way Associates are happy is because of the stocks they received and the growth they saw in those stocks. So your Associates are indirectly happy investors. This worked so far, but with COVID19 it started testing this theory of keeping your Customer and investors happy and making your associates happy indirectly ...

Here we are exploring a scenario, what if COVID hit the world 10 year before i.e around 2009 ? Around 2009, we are in deep recession or trying just to come out of recession. World is in negative GDP growth, unemployment rate was around 10%. In 2019 the unemployment rate is 3.6%. Financially all the countries are in dire situations and it would have been catastrophic event for the entire world. Financially, health care wise, technology wise we can neither deal with back to back blows nor well equipped with the technology. As COVID hit in 2019 and humans are well prepared with eCommerce NOW than any time in the history. they are used to ordering online and picking up at store and for delivery. Companies have this kind of systems/sites/infrastructure in place, which is saving people from stepping out of the car in these situations. This is in very early stages during 2009 and online grocery was a thought at that time. It will be very difficult for people to get groceries at home in ...

I understand this is a touchy subject, but lets go with an opinionated approach on how should an org maintain the ratio with respect to developers, testers, architects, Infrastructure, security, Product Owners, Managers, Scrum masters etc., I am talking about typical E-commerce project here, not like ERP projects, Infrastructure, security projects etc., Let me slice this one peel at a time. First let's talk about Product owners and Managers. There is NO role called managers/directors in my idealistic world. Managers or reporting manager are typically owners of one or multiple product/s. Director is nothing but owner of that domain where he has multiple product owners reporting to him. Product owners/Managers are responsible for product vision, roadmap, synchronization with other products. No discussion on developer role, but he is also responsible for operational support, creation and maintenance of infrastructure needed for the project whether K8's or PaaS through orga...

How do you measure the performance of your team ? There are always different ways to measure it, but we are talking about technical teams here. Here are few things I can think of for a development team and some things taken from the book Accelerated. Delivery lead time (less than one hour for changes) Deployment frequency (on demand - multiple deploys per day) Time to restore service (less than one hour) Change fail rate (0-15%)  Adaptability (teams having quick appetite org changes and change of feature requests) SLA's (response less than 15 mins and resolution less than hour) Able to turn on and off configuration for new features or turning off few stores/customers in region. KBYC - Know before your customer (apart from auto recovery based on errors, also knowing before your customer complains) Having a culture where everybody understands computer perform repetitive tasks and humans solve problems. New work should be 50%, unplanned support work 25%, other...

We have been hearing about the negative effects of Corona all this while. Unarguably we have negative effects on HealthCare systems, economy and social life etc., But lets talk about the other side what are the positive effects of COVID19 ? please feel free to add in comments anything you can think of (positives only). Global carbon emissions at all time low ever recorded. Crime rate lowest possible, people are isolating themselves and thinking about their families and themselves. People are spending more time with families , little more time than they like :-) Companies/employees are adopting to remote work. Now companies seriously need to evaluate need for travel. People are praying for their neighbors to be healthy. 99% of people are same page currently, they all don't want to spread virus and control it effectively. Spiritual taste of people improved. Not sure if the cause is fear or more time at hand. wild life is enjoying places otherwise occupied by humans. Peopl...

COVID19 like other major disasters humans faced will definitely change us for good. My projection is, its going to change the way we think and operate. I am pointing out few things I can think of could change potentially because of COVID19 impact on humans. Health Insurance industry might come up with a clause of 'global pandemic' may NOT be covered under general insurance. They might expect governments to cover these unforeseen and mammoth costs. I am not debating good or bad but possible shifts. Travel Insurance can be costly and cover pandemic cancellations and hospitalization/repatriations. Restaurants will be more lean and TO GO based than dine in and ambience. There will be less demand for products and more saving mentality. If 2008 recession changed the world behavior towards saving, COVID19 recession will make saving habits much stronger. People will start holding on to houses, cars, electronics longer than usual, indication of lesser spending. Work from home w...

If you want to understand any new area start with user journey maps. Meeting stakeholders, having 30-60-90 plan, walking through architecture diagrams are helpful techniques. But it is always useful to understand user journey. Understand your user journey. Right from what are user entry points, down stream systems, dependencies, bottlenecks and response SLA's. This understanding at one level above architecture helps you to know what is expectation and it will lead to right questions on your architecture. You should deep dive on to underlying systems, OS versions, metrics, incident trends. Incidents trend will help you in understanding amount of work you are handling, then dive into response and resolution SLA's, this will help you understand the discipline in support. Then try evaluate change success rate. Start diving into opportunities of automation in support. The analytics and trends you built in the first place will help you to find the opportunities for improvement. L...

Take this prediction with pinch of salt, almost like the guy who predicted in late 1800's that London streets will have feet of dust on the road because of number of horses buggies going down the roads. Which was not true because car's invented and we started dusting our skies with pollution instead of roads. We screwed it up either way, thats a different story. Lets analyze Health Care Insurance in US, it is one of the most complicated system which can throw off statisticians, attorneys and mathematicians equally. every body part is different, eyes are different than teeth different than nose/throat different than rest of the body, don't forget about pre-existing conditions, co-pays, out of pocket, max cap. Different diseases are treated differently. All the best if you can understand your "Explanation of Benefits" letter. Every year the costs are increasing and regulations are most complex. To add to that 50 states have 50 different rules. I feel the Cloud...

Its always easier to say than do :-) let me start with that statement. We all heard about leveraging opportunities and handling crisis effectively in our professional career. We all know the most valuable commodity in the world is time, they stopped manufacturing it. Suddenly world started having the 25th hour. The one hour which we always needed, the one hour we always talked about our entire lives and the one hour we always dreamed of. Let me explain how we all got one hour extra in a day. Due to Covid19 most of the corporate America is working from home. we all know working from home comes with its own challenges. Average commute time in US is close to 26 mins one way. including the preparation time you have an additional one hour every day at the least. Fortunately/Unfortunately you don't any more sports to catchup with. The media is busy in scaring you about the situation, if you are sane individual by this time you might have stopped watching news. If you remove the distr...

Let me explain what I am comparing here. PaaS can be any Platform offering from Azure, GCP or AWS. By Wrapper /Custom Orchestrator I mean a portal developed in house to unify experience and standardize tools across organization. The advantage of going with straight PaaS offering is you will have all the benefits of innovation from your cloud service provider. Resource you are hiring from external will already equipped with knowledge and day 1 productivity is possible. No need to maintain training sessions for employees as there are so many trainings available online for free. Access to the cloud provider portal can be controlled per department by subscription. This way budget can still be tracked by grouping all the subscriptions in the division. The power of portal, CLI tools can be leverage along with straight hooks for the DEV tools/studios. Innovations and integrations provided by cloud vendor can be experimented as soon as they hit the market. Coming to the disadvantages , g...

As far as i am concerned Batch processing is the best example for need of elasticity of infrastructure. Whether it is ETL, File processing, Event based, Time based or Ingress request based. Lot of Organizations have full set of VM's hogging on to the computes to run a job once in a day, week or month. Lot of companies have mainframe batch jobs, windows task schedulers, linux Cron jobs, in house job schedulers etc., If you are looking to future, K8's Cron job, Volcano or Kube Batch can offer nice features to maintain batch job workloads in Kubernetes world. Serverless can be an alternative too. But the question is what is the difference between 0 VM's vs 1 worker VM. Because you are NOT going to save a lot by going to Zero. And if you are using something like Azure Functions as your Serverless strategy you need to understand, if you are really leveraging consumption model or NOT. Don't come to the assumption if you are using Azure Functions you are serverless. The ...