Women Technology Leaders

The Most Beautiful Museum gets the Most Reliable Centre for Excellence

 

Firstly, Many Congrats to the “Amazing Team” at IDC Technologies for winning the Museum of The Future (MOTF) project. Here are few reasons why we absolutely needed to win it!

 

Having lived in the magical city of Dubai for more than 2 decades, the excitement of winning the bid for Expo2020 and the fireworks that lit the sky 8 years ago still reverberate in our minds. MOTF is the cynosure of the Expo - representing humanity’s inspiration for hope, future, and innovation. The amazing museum which is already declared as one of the “Most beautiful museums of the world” is an architectural marvel that is symbolic – the circular structure represents humanity; the green mound represents the earth; the void represents the unknown future –

 

We derive our values and inspiration from what the museum stands for and from the wise leadership of this magnificent land whose quotes will remain the biggest source of inspiration for me irrespective of wherever I am or will be:

 

• Life is created simple and it is important to live it as such. Simplicity is inherent; it leads to peace of mind.
• They say the sky is the limit. We say: The sky is only the beginning.
• There is a world of difference between a leadership that is based on love and respect, and one that is based on fear.
• A true leader is one who creates a favorable environment to bring out the energy and ability of the team. A great leader creates more great leaders.
• We, in the UAE, have no such word as “impossible”; it does not exist in our lexicon. Such a word is used by the lazy and the weak, who fear challenges and progress.
• The future belongs to those who can imagine it, design it, and execute it. It isn’t something you await, but rather create.
• Dubai will never settle for anything less than the first place.

It’s payback time to this beautiful land of Dubai whose every inch of soil breathes perseverance, peace and success. 

We are absolutely thrilled to contribute our capabilities towards the launch of the museum, and we will not leave a single stone unturned to make this a huge success.

We are proud to announce that Shivagami Gugan, the Group CTO of IDC Technologies will be one of the speakers at DevOps Summit of India 2021

Key Note Speaker at DevOps Summit of India 2021

Reliability is everybody’s problem

 Reliability is everyone’s problem, not just the SRE's......

1. What barriers are there to SRE adoption?

<Shivagami Gugan>

There are no real barriers towards  adopting Site Reliability Engineering practices. Any organization irrespective of whichever level of maturity they currently exist today, can adopt SRE and improve its business outcomes. However, the key underlying principles of SRE and its applicability should be understood properly. There is a lot of hype around transformation, and the first barrier is about understanding what SRE means within your Organisational context. I find most of the time,  people try to imitate what highly mature companies like Google or Spotify or some other cloud-born company do, and this usually results in failures. SRE is the purest form of the implementation of DevOps. SRE is about removing the silos in a Product lifecycle towards achieving business outcomes in a safer, faster, cheaper, and better manner. If this is understood clearly, the first barrier gets removed.

The second barrier is to have this complicated vision of boiling the ocean - doing 100% Agile, 100% DevOps, or 100% SRE. This doesn’t work, especially when you have heritage systems of records, on-prem services, and heritage infrastructure, and a whole lot of baggage built over several years (sometimes decades) which is the usual case for most of the companies. So be wise in choosing target areas.

The third barrier is when you think SREs specializes in building operational reliability but do not have anything to do with the development or the deployment phases of the lifecycle. Reliability is everyone’s problem – the technical product manager, the developer, the tester, the support engineer; not just the SREs. The reality about the SRE role is to ensure service's availability and reliability by supporting the other teams that own these services. SREs are enablers, they are collaborators, and their goal is to ensure that the services are overall resilient, reliable and that incremental value is delivered in a continual manner. So they will have to wear multiple hats, sometimes depending upon the situational needs, chip in during design to ensure resiliency is built-in. Some other time they may be coaching and enabling teams to bake in proper observability within the product. The core value that anything “manual is evil” is applied across the spectrum. Hence they enable the team to automate using CI/CD flows, build quality measures towards self-regulation (such as test coverage, cyclo-complexity of code), automate deployments (infrastructure as code), automate closed loop remediations. 

You may now appreciate that, this means the role plays in the continuum of the  product lifecycle and is not just restricted to Operational aspects or incident response as we usually perceive the SRE role to be. Usually when an Organisation understands that implementing SRE is an underpinning cultural change that affects all part of the organization, then it becomes easier to remove the main barriers.

2. What human attributes or characteristics make someone a great SRE?

<Shivagami Gugan>

SREs are huge collaborators, they are people who are goal-driven, have big picture thinking and having the ability to work on multiple aspects of product resilience. This makes them multi-skilled, and people who have an extensive growth mindset. They should have the ability to get into details quickly, think on the feet and be brave towards problem resolution. And when any mistakes happen (they always do!), SREs have the ability to blamelessly look the situation which again makes them very cool headed and collaborative. They hate anything that has to be done more than twice and will always look towards automating anything that’s boring and repetitive. They are great coders.

 

3. What are the ways to spot a great SRE? 

<Shivagami Gugan>

·        SRE are coders. They know the toolset of the Product thoroughly.

·        If coming from the Dev side, they are programmers who understand infrastructure, can shell script and write interpreter code with ease. If coming from Ops side, they are the people who understand application design and development.

·        They ensure SLOs are set at correct boundaries of service, they define alerts to detect SLI thresholds

·        They measure and report performance against the SLI –Availability (Up time, Error Ratio –5xx/Total Requests)  Performance (RPS, Latency)

·        Their Operation load is capped at ~50 percent

·        They enable developers on CI/CD automation, quality thresholds  and deployment automation using infrastructure as code

·        They enable developers to understand how their applications are performing in production building observability, using distributed tracing and APM tools

·        They thoroughly understand deployment, fail-safe strategies - Rollback, Canary and Feature Flags.

·        They influence in building fault-tolerant, autoscaling, cost-efficient, highly performing design and architecture.

·        SRE should ensure consumption of platform standards, should raise pull requests to enhance SRE Product/ Tool chain features.

·        SREs ensure consistency of tooling - All lower environments use consistent methodologies and same tooling as used in higher environments.

·        SREs handle on-call events and do post mortems  (For e.g. They are adept with Memory dump analysis, Thread dump analysis, OS level diagnostics, Functional diagnostics)

·        SRE ensures error budgets are followed, they ensure self-regulation of velocity and stability  and ensure excess Ops work overflows to the Dev team

Excerpt from my interview on SRE, if you wish to learn more, tune into DevOps Institute SkilUp days, and listen in to the entire talk......

 Brihadharanya Upanishad

Excerpts from Kila Kanda (you may not understand a word of what is written below, and that is perfectly ok). Someonene who has gone through Upanishadic teachings will understand this easily. Some others who have gone through Bhagavad Gita's teachings may understand a few things but not fully.

As everyone is quite interested to know about what happens after death, the following is the direct verbatim translation on the topic from Brihadharanya Upanishads. It is ultra simplified, I apologize for the simplification. The intent is to make it reach a few soul-searchers at least, 

People are of 3 types

·        People who do Upasana (selfless spiritual devotion)

·        People who do Yajna-Dhana-Tapas Karma

·        People who are Charuvakhyas (just merrymaking on earth, the people who waste the Manusha Janama by being materialistic)

 

I.                 People who do Upasana (selfless spiritual devotion)

 

1)     People who do Upasana (spiritual devotion or in other words selfless devotion) on passing away will go through the bright path -> guided by Shuklamarga god, Uttarayana God, the god of sunshine, and will go to Surya Loka, Vidhyut Loka and finally guided by the Manasa Devata will be guided to BrahmaLoka. BrahmaLoka is also called SatyaLoka.

2)     Here Brahma will take classes and teach them about Swarupa (SatChit Ananda) from the Upanishads. It is mentioned clearly that they will not be taught the VedaPurva section (the section that deals with karmakanda) but only the Vedantha section (only the Spiritual guidance section like the Madu Kanda and Muni Kanda of Brihadharanyam).

3)     Brahmaji years are very long, and these souls will stay with Brahmaji until Pralaya Kalam.

4)     The souls that get Jnanam,(self-knowledge) will attain Jeevan Mukhti. They will then attain Videha Mukhti at the end of Pralaya Kalam. Then the entire process of New Srishti will start after Pralaya.

5)     Impt point: Such people do not come back to Earth. There is no Re-birth. Punaravarthathe... Punaravarthathe…. (they will not come back to Earth, they will not come back to Earth)

 

II.               People who do Yajna-Dhana-Tapas Karma 

6)     People who do Yajna-Dhana-Tapas karma earn Punya. Yajna in very short terms means Upasana but for worldly seeks (e.g. Jothishya homam for Swarga, Arthi, Arthathi types of devotees), Dhana is Charity, and Tapas is Self-discipline (self-denial, moderation of everything). This Punya will take them based on the gradation of Punya to Bhuloka, Bhuvar loka, Svarga loka, Maharloka, Janaloka, Taparlok etc

7)     They travel through the Krishnapaksha path, guided by Smoke god, night god, dhakshinayana god, god for Krishnapaksha and will reach one of the Swarga Lokas above.

8)     They will stay there doing Sevas to the Devas there (like assistants etc.) and enjoy the Swarga until the Punya gets depleted gradually and fully gets exhausted. There is no suffering, pain, disease there. Once the Punya gets over they will come back to Earth taking a Rebirth.

 

III.              People who are Charuvakyas (materialistic people who have wasted their Manusha Janama by being materialistic, neither did Upasana or Yajna-Dhana-Tapas)

9)     Charuvakis go through a path called “AdoGathi”. It is written that they will be born as germs, moths (patangs), biting insects and other smaller insects.

 

What is PanchaAgni Vidhya (doctrine of 5 fires)

This is one of the most toughest part of Rebirth that every Jivatma has to undergo. The travel journey after disposal of one body and attaining a new one is through a process called Panchagni Vidhya. The 5 fires are Heaven, Cloud (produces rain), Earth (produces plant eaten as food by the male), Male (Progeny), and Female (baby). The process is guarded by the guardrails of Sanchita Karma, Aagami Karma that will result in Prarabhda (new body, shape, color, which parents rich, poor, diseased, where etc. etc.)

https://www.advaita-vision.org/the-fires-of-reincarnation/

 

Side notes

               Sanchita Karma is the bank of karma for a Jivatma. All the pluses and minuses (Punya and Papam) account goes to Sanchita

               Prarabhda is a portion of Sanchita that is taken out for that particular birth (there is much more left behind in the bank). Prarabhda results in shape, color, parents, place, disease, luck, fortune, wealth etc. for the Jivatama for that particular Janam.

               Aagami Karma is the Karma that is created newly in the birth itself. If it can be consummated in the same birth, this will be fructified in the same birth (karma begets karma or as you sow, so you reap). In case the current body and circumstances are constrained and then the karma cannot fructify, then this will go to the Sanchita bank.

It is written that No karma will escape. Not even a pinpoint of both good or bad karma can escape a Jivatma. This is a self-regulated cycle across several Janamas.

  Best Way 

The best it appears is to attain Jnanam and attain JivanMukti on Earth.

There is only one way to attain Jnanam > Systematic study of Vedas and Upanishads under the guidance of an able Guru. This will purify the mind, elevate the person from materialism and make him/her understand the truest bliss of Satchitananda.

For such a Jnani, as quoted by Upanishads and Gita there is no Rebirth. For such people, the Sanchita and Aagami will burn, and at the end of Prarabhda such Jivas are released to respective forces of nature, never to be born again.          

The Link between Sleep and Performance of Leaders

Thou hast no figures nor no fantasies, Which busy care draws in the brains of men; Therefore thou sleep’st so sound. —William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar 

 In the passage above, Brutus enviously reflects on the timeless truth that people without worries and anxieties his servant Lucius, enjoys the most peaceful and uninterrupted rest. 

We have seen once in a while how senior execs, caffeinated and worn out, after hours of wakeful slumber, struggle to recall simple facts, seem disengaged and uninspired, lack patience with others, and can’t think through problems or reach clear-cut decisions. 

 McKinsey's research has highlighted a strong correlation between leadership performance and organizational health,2 itself a strong predictor of a healthy bottom line. the research found that four types of leadership behavior are most commonly associated with high-quality executive teams: the ability to operate with a strong orientation to results, to solve problems effectively, to seek out different perspectives, and to support others. In all four cases, is a proven link between sleep and effective leadership.

There is no merit when someone boasts  "I sleep for a couple of hours only" Research has time and again proven that all the good hormones in the body get rejuvenated during a good night's sleep. To say "Have a good sleep" is no panacea for the sleep-deprived. This is where mental fortitude, support from friends and family, spiritual well-being,  things like yoga, meditation, and reading soul-searching books help in the overall health of leaders -> physical, mental, psychological, making them truly empathetic and successful leaders.

Construction Industry Disruption with 3D printing

The future of construction?

🔎 Learn more about how 3D printing is being used in construction: https://t.co/J7H7DLvdbj pic.twitter.com/jvBOs1QkAA

— World Economic Forum (@wef) January 2, 2021