This week I was fortunate enough to interview a good friend of mine Saurabh Jain. Saurabh has spent the last 6 years at Riverbed Technology located in Bengaluru and New Delhi as a Tech Evangelist in SD-WAN and Observability. While I’d worked with Saurabh remotely for some time, I finally got to meet him in person about 18 months ago to discuss some options around getting closer to customers. Saurabh’s passion for people and technology immediately clicked with my own and we were able to work together to have him architect a large project for a prominent national company in India where we got to know each other better and our shared passion for customer success grew.
Leigh: Why did you get into technology?
Saurabh: When I was young I could see how technology could solve problems for real people. I started my career about 15 years ago in the Telco space where I worked on one of the first LTE networks and what I saw was an evolution in technology similar to that from touch tone phones to cellular phones. I began to see a revolution or data-wave coming enabling new capabilities such as streaming live content anywhere, IoT (even more-so with 5G), and remote working from anywhere. Business leaders knew the future of data-wave and were quick to jump on the LTE bandwagon to enable their teams to work anywhere.
Leigh: Having spent hours commuting in India (2 hour Uber trips are not uncommon) I can appreciate the difference LTE and now 5G can enable. I have several friends that watch the IPL (India Premier League) to and from work.
Saurabh: From there I moved into Data Centre SDN with a Korean startup. What I saw was the opportunity to change the game when it comes to how we design networks. Back in 2014 SDN was a hot topic as the idea of centralised and hybrid control planes came into play in data centres. All the big players were doing it: Google, Facebook, and everyone wanting to use OpenFlow. This meant that we could use generic hardware rather than buying high end switches and routers. All of the decisions were made centrally meaning may use TCAM table to route traffic. These programmable ASICs offers flexibility and versatility to a developer.
In 2017 I moved back to India and started working with Riverbed Technology in SD-WAN and Observability. Observability was particularly interesting as it allowed me to illuminate all blind spots and improve the customer experience. If I had app/website that took a little while to render, I would quickly change to an alternative app. I could see how performance and observability could make a significant difference to people and reduce churn for companies. Being able to measure the experience meant that we can improve it.
Leigh: What kind of problems have you been able to solve using observability tools?
Saurabh: To often I see war rooms in large organisations where you see one team present their stats, and another team show their stats. Stats fights don’t solve problems. I often see problems stemming from a lack of historical and comprehensive data meaning that people are not working together to solve problems, but rather defend their own business unit. With Observability people need to change their mindset from individual, to words thinking as an organisation.
With Observability we’ve been able to solve problems including hypervisor over-subscription, utilisation problems, and being able to trace transactions end-to-end as they come from the user right through to the backend, and every micro service in between.
Leigh: Why should people get into Observability?
Saurabh: Observability means continuous learning because you have to learn a little about everything, networks, cyber, apps, infrastructure. Continuous learning is great for curious minds.
Leigh: What are you researching and looking into at the moment?
Saurabh: The meshing of Cyber and Observability. They overlap really well because you can’t secure what you can’t see.
Leigh: Do you have any recommendations for people to learn more about observability?
Saurabh: I really encourage people to read about the four golden signals:
- Latency
- Traffic
- Errors
- Saturation
Most people miss saturation when troubleshooting, and I believe it is a critical part of troubleshooting. You can read more here https://sre.google/sre-book/monitoring-distributed-systems/
You can find Saurabh on LinkedIn and Medium. If you like this article, please like and you can buy a copy of the SRE book here.
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