Q: One of your engineering focus areas is designing telemetry applications, particularly with Azure and AI integrations. Can you tell us about how you develop and deploy this innovation? And how can businesses benefit from deploying telemetry applications?
A: I perform a critical role as part of a cloud computing technology team involved in creating cloud infrastructure projects. My focus area is designing and developing telemetry applications for cloud computing. In a non-cloud environment, applications are created and deployed on their own private servers, and the telemetry is always available on their servers at any point of time. However, this is totally different in cloud computing.
Individuals and businesses deploy their applications in any of the public clouds, like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). These public cloud providers create infrastructure for businesses based on the configuration, and it is typically a public virtual machine that is deployed across the globe.
These virtual machines are not 100% available, because they keep getting destroyed and recreated based on the load. In this scenario, users’ telemetry information like logs, metrics, and traces cannot be found when the virtual machines are destroyed or recreated.
I work on projects that collect this information and store it in a different virtual machine, and make it available for customers 24/7. The biggest challenge with this kind of project is the amount and the frequency of data. I use all advanced system software development concepts, like the In-Proc memory processing mechanism, to process the received data before it gets stored.
Additionally, this telemetry project removes the overhead for the business users to create their application to store and retrieve data from cloud. With my solution, a business can do this with just a few configuration settings and enabling the necessary certificate to secure it.
Q: What are some of the other high performance applications you have developed recently? With such a diverse array of new applications in and entering the marketplace, how do businesses keep up? How do – or should – business and IT leaders evaluate which tools to leverage to drive process improvements and profitability?
A: Recently, I started working on an Open Telemetry Protocol (OTLP) project for Azure cloud. OTLP is one of the open source protocols that is used for collecting and transmitting telemetry data. This OTLP can be configured to collect information using GRPC and HTTP depending on the customer’s needs.
I work on the unified application, which will work on both Linux (Ubuntu, Centos, Mariner) and Windows operating systems, and supports both X64 and ARM64 OS architecture. As OTLP is an open source protocol, any individual and business can easily get help in understanding the OTLP architecture. They can publish the data by setting the cloud configuration, and they can start getting the logs, traces, and metrics for their application.
This will directly impact their development time to create such a sophisticated infrastructure for cloud computing. As my project supports various authentications like Key Vault and certificate base authentication, it is highly secured. Currently, this application can process approximately 70,000 events per second per virtual machine.
Q: Much of your development work has supported companies in the retail sector. What is your forecast for how new technologies will impact this industry over the next five to ten years? What are the applications that retail business owners should be looking to adopt, and which will deliver the greatest ROI?
A: Yes, I have previously worked in many major retail companies. During that time, I primarily worked on projects in which I developed applications to crawl our competitors’ websites for price matching and providing offers. In recent years, third party service providers have evolved to offer services to get the current price and price history of any product. Availing this kind of service, rather than developing in-house applications, will help the business in two ways.
First, the service is readily available, in comparison with developing in-house applications, which is a time-consuming process provided the technical team is already available. Getting this service from a third party will help the technical team to focus on other business areas for improvements. Second, a lot of effort is required to maintain web crawler applications. I worked in one of the largest retailers in the UK developing a web crawler application, and it used to work well for almost six months.
Later, the company’s competitors drastically changed their application, making it impossible for our in-house web crawler to grab the live price, which necessitated redesigning the project. This created a huge loss for the company. Alternatively, if this service had been purchased from a third party (i.e. CamelCamelCamel.com), the company might have saved a lot of time and resources.
Q: As a senior leader, you bring strong leadership skills and are heavily involved in training other software engineers and teams and evaluating their work. How important is this to your role? What are some of the challenges and upsides you encounter in this function?
A: I was involved in training new and lateral employees in both technical and subject matters. In the past two decades, technology has evolved along with education. Training college graduates 15 years ago is totally different than training college graduates of the present age, thanks to the development of technology and social media.
Present college graduates are aware of the latest technological trends, such as AI, ML, and cloud computing. However, there is a challenge in training them to design and develop legacy applications.
Some of the legacy applications, such as banking systems and retail systems, are getting upgraded, but a good number of applications are still running with legacy code base. Though the new graduates are knowledgeable in cutting-edge technologies, the need for understanding the legacy software application development is inevitable.
Most notably, the improvement of computer hardware has developed to a point where running any inefficient code is now possible, even if it may ultimately lead to project failure. But ten years back, that was not the case, as the resources were limited and any small memory leak could explode the whole server, so quality was given great importance.
We are now in a business environment in which competition is growing fast, which changes the priority of a business. In the rush to bring a product to market, a business is now likely to adopt any working solution, as opposed to the most efficient solution. Because products need to be released as quickly as possible, quality takes the back seat. This creates issues in the long run.
Q: In addition to training your internal team members, you serve as a judge for the prestigious Brandon Hall Group EdTech Excellence Awards programme, which recognises innovative and cutting-edge trailblazers in education technology at all levels, from K-12 and higher education schools, to professional development and other associations, nonprofit organisations, and government agencies. How did you come to be a judge and why is this important to you?
A: I am always looking for opportunities to learn and contribute. I was grateful for the opportunity to serve as a judge for the Brandon Hall Technology Excellence Awards, an annual event that focuses on awarding the best innovative projects in technology. I realised that reading technical journals and newsletters is not sufficient to understand the growing trends, as technology is evolving faster than ever before.
I wanted to view the other people working on technology and learn from them, and also wanted to share with others the knowledge that I have gained over the past two decades working in various sectors across the globe. The Brandon Hall Technology Excellence Awards programme is the perfect fit for my expectations. I was honoured to be selected to be part of their judging panel after submitting my resume, providing my technical background, and clearing their judging interview.
This is helping me in two ways. First, the participants of this event are highly respected and have excellent reputations in the technology industry. These participants are submitting their innovative products, which can truly change the world in a better way. I get an opportunity to understand and learn about those trends and future technologies before they are publicly available.
Next, I have the opportunity to rank and provide feedback about the participants’ innovative products and services, which I hope will help them with improving their projects. This is indirectly making me a part of their next gen innovation. This is very satisfying, as I get a volunteering opportunity that enables me to learn and also contribute to society.
