Welcome back to Beyond The Data! This month, we’re highlighting Dipali Kendre, a DevOps Engineer on the Managed Services team with a passion for solving customer problems.
Tell us your name, where you’re from, and a little about you.
My name is Dipali Kendre and I’m from Latur, Maharashtra – the tourist hub surrounded by many historical monuments. Presently, I live in Bangalore and have been living here for the past 4 years. I have a Bachelor of Engineering degree in Computer Science from Pune University. Some advice I live by is to be dedicated to your work, keep dreaming, and take one step every day to fulfill them.
What does "DevOps Engineer" mean? What do you actually do in any given day?
As a DevOps engineer, I take care of customer clusters, handling alerts, on-call support pager duty, and resolving any run by request from the customers pertaining to the business. I’m also involved in cluster performance tuning and architecture reviews, along with the Solution Architect. Additionally, I often draft, schedule, and perform maintenance in the production environment.
Tell us about the Managed Services team.Â
The Managed Services team takes care of the entire cluster and makes sure the business always up and running without any disruption – this is possible only with the help of a 24/7 model. We have ansible automation for all the config changes that need to go in one push. We also have several internal tools that help us proactively monitor and troubleshoot any issues that come along. For example, phData’s best practice analyzer tool has a lot of features that are incredibly helpful for the Hadoop administrator/engineers who are maintaining the clusters. The team itself has an interesting mix of people with different backgrounds and expertise, which contributes to our customer’s success.
How long have you been with phData? What past experiences have prepared you for your job at phData?
I have been in phData for over a year. So far, so good! I joined phData after finishing my engineering degree. As a new graduate, it’s really nice to work along with some very experienced people in our field, having the opportunity to learn a lot and grow along with the company.
How have you seen the company change in that time? How has your job evolved?
When I joined, we were a team of 27 people in Bangalore and working in a coworking space. Now we are a team of 60 and moved to our own office! I started my career at phData working on a regular shift. Now that we have moved to a 24/7 model, I rotate through all of the three shifts (morning, noon, and night). Working the night shifts gives me an opportunity to work along with my counterpart in the U.S., which I enjoy.
What is the one thing you want customers to know about phData?
If you have a problem, phData has the solution.
What are the most exciting things you’re working on and how do you see them positively impacting our customers?
The Managed Services team takes care of the OS patching for one of our customers. Since its a regularly scheduled maintenance, we planned to automate it so we’ve written ansible automation that patches all the nodes in the one cluster on the fly with a single command. This saves us a lot of time and we have received positive feedback from the customer.
What do you do for fun when you’re not working?Â
When I’m not working, I like to read books, especially in the Marathi language, and take photos of nature. Some of my favorite shots are included below! I also love singing because I personally feel a song has the power to explain your emotions.
