Shreyas Rao

🧑‍💻 About Me

Hey there! I'm Shreyas Rao, a Senior Software Developer who enjoys building things in the cloud. I love designing highly available, scalable and resilient distributed systems using Kubernetes, with a passion for automating processes and optimizing systems.

💡 What Do I Do?

Currently, I work at SAP Labs, where I have almost 7 years of work experience in contributing to Project Gardener, a highly scalable, robust and resilient managed multi-cloud Kubernetes-as-a-Service platform for cloud-based applications and services across the SAP's product portfolio.

📦 Scaling & Maintaining Kubernetes Infrastructure

• Developed the disaster recovery mechanism for Gardener-managed Kubernetes clusters.
• Developed & maintained Kubernetes operators (etcd-backup-restore, etcd-druid, kupid, etc), improving stability & resilience.
• Enhanced disaster recovery—reducing cluster restoration time from 12 hours to 30 minutes by fixing gaps in etcd restoration.

🚀 Leading & Optimizing High Availability Solutions

• Led a team of 6 developers in implementing high-availability for Gardener-managed Kubernetes control planes, boosting uptime from 96% to 99.5% while keeping cloud costs optimized.
• Designed robust backup & restore protocols to protect 400TB of critical cluster data, preventing data loss.

🛠 Improving DevOps & Observability

• Developed a Kubernetes Custom Resource based solution to automate operations, reducing manual intervention and improving productivity.
• Integrated Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, and Fluentbit to enhance monitoring & alerting for cluster failures.
• Improved CI/CD pipelines using Concourse & Prow, accelerating deployments and reducing manual overhead.

🎤 Open Source, Talks & Community Engagement

• Coordinated presentation efforts at two international KubeCon events, presenting Gardener's cloud-native innovations to 500+ attendees, increasing community engagement by 40%.
• Organized a Kubernetes Meetup in Bangalore (2018), attracting 200+ participants
• Mentored 6+ engineers, streamlined the onboarding process and reduced onboarding time by 50%.

📈 Building & Growing Teams

• Helped scale the Gardener team at SAP from 2 to 20 engineers (900% growth in 2 years), conducting 50+ technical interviews.
• Championed best software engineering practices by introducing pair programming and test-driven development within the team, leading to faster development cycles, improved code maintainability and increased test coverage from 40% to 85%, leading to fewer production incidents and improved reliability.

💻 Projects I've Worked On

Here are some of the key projects I have contributed to, building scalable, cloud-native, and high-availability solutions.

🦾 What Am I Good At?

Golang    Bash Scripting    Python    Kubernetes    Etcd    Cloud Computing      Distributed System Design      Amazon Web Services    Google Cloud Platform    Microsoft Azure

🎓 Education & 📜 Certifications

📅 Organizing Events? Been There, Done That!

• Coordinated logistics and outreach for the Kubernetes Meetup 2018 in Bangalore, attracting over 200 participants.
• As the lead of the SAP Music Band, I helped organize various musical performances (and performed in many of them too 😉).
• Led a team of 50+ volunteers in organizing multiple socio-cultural events over the past years.

🎯 What Are My Hobbies?

🫱🏻‍🫲🏼 Social Responsibility

Over the past decade, I have strived to help those in need, as is my responsibility to society and the people around me.

• As part of an SAP program Girl Power Tech, I mentored over 40 college girls from rural areas in corporate etiquette and interview preparedness.
• As a volunteer of the NGO Youth For Seva, I facilitated comprehensive training sessions for 180 government school students across 6 batches, enhancing their preparation for the NMMS scholarship exam.
• Additionally, I helped develop and implement targeted study materials and mock exams for 300+ students across the state of Karnataka.