Kannan Solaiappan, Head of Reliability and Data Engineering at Circles Life, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss building a team in a start-up environment and the complexities of balancing reliability and security with scale. Kannan describes the challenges of building a semi-platform multiple instances model and how products like Severalnines have helped identify and optimize potential problems before they affect customers. Kannan and Corey also discuss the impact that major outages had on the world at large when it came to fault-tolerance on entry points, and Kannan explains how guardrails can improve reliability without creating the same resistance from engineers that governance can.

About Kannan

With over 20 years of experience in the technology industry, Kannan Solaiappan is a highly motivated and passionate leader with a track record of driving results. With a background in software development, operations, architecture, security, and Agile transformation, Kannan has served as a Head of DevOps/Reliability/Data Engineering & Architecture, managing budgets of over 10 million dollars. Kannan has successfully led teams of up to 80 members and has a strong background in building and maintaining world-class organizational structures and cultures.

Currently, Kannan is leading a team of SRE, DevOps, and Data Engineering professionals at Circles Life, Asia’s first fully digital telco, where Kannan  is working towards building the world’s best Telco SAAS platform with a focus on CiCD, observability, reliability, resilience, and security.

Kannan has a diverse set of skills including IT Service Management, team management, IT strategy, vendor management, site reliability engineering, Architecture and leadership.

Links Referenced:

• Severalnines: https://severalnines.com/
• Circles.Life: https://circles.life
• Circles.Life Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/circleslifesg/
• Circles.Life Twitter: https://twitter.com/circleslifesg
• Circles.Life Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CirclesLifeSG/