Driving Innovation: Gaurav Saxena on Platform Engineering, Observability, and Automotive-Scale Software

Hey everyone. We're back here live at Cube Con, cloud Native Con, wrapping up our day three coverage. I want to introduce you to our, our next guest, and if I mispronounce his name, I apologize.

Gorav Ana. Yes. Gorav is Gov's a real life platform engineer for a major automotive company.

Um, he gave two talks here at Q Con this year. One was on behalf of the open SSF and one was on behalf of the, uh, PE Open Telemetry, oh, Excuse me, the hotel, uh, conference. Now, Monday of this week was satellite conference day, so we had hotel, uh, we had the hotel conference, we had the open SSF conference.

We, they had others. We had the PE conference, we had a backstage Con Argo. They were Argo Argo, CD Con.

And the rest, you know, it's the day for all of them, but gov let, let's hear about your two, uh, your two presentations. Sure. But before we do, yes.

Without, I don't want to, you know, we're not mentioning companies or anything like this, but give an I people an idea of, you know, how long have you been a platform engineer? What do you, what's your journey been like? Yeah, so I've been a platform engineer for about 10 years now, and, uh, I today work for a major automotive company.

So my work is basically, I, I lead a platform managing team to build an internal developer platform. So think like many verticals, observability, Kubernetes, CICD database as a service, messaging and service. So that's the work we do today for our internal teams to improve their developer productivity and efficiency.

Very good. And, uh, my talks that you mentioned about one was for the open telemetry. So basically the use cases are how do we do the over the air deployments to the vehicles?

How do we monitor them through our open telemetry stack? That was my talk based on the generalized hotel concepts. The second talk was around the open security.

So how do we do the secure software supply chain? Like how do we make sure that software that we're deploying to the vehicles are secured by nature? So that was a talk around the, around the open security part.

Excellent. Yes. You know, that, that's one of the interesting things about platform engineering, talking about observability, talking about security, but it all kind of fits in right to this idea of a platform, an underlying platform that we build upon, whether it's DevOps or, or cloud native or, you know, we we're building on that platform.

It, it, it touches all of those things. Good. Um, what, what was some feedback from the audience from, you know, peers and other platform engineers there?

What did they think? Yeah, So I got a huge interest on the way we do open telemetry today. And the reason being is that, uh, in my current role, we are using hotel stack for all the three signals, logs, metrics, traces, and how do we use this in a vendor agnostic way, right?

It's an open, it's an open source standard. How do you scale millions of vehicles that are support on the platform? How do you monitor them?

How do you monitor the, the, the progress of the software delivery? How do you enhance the cloud software development through open telemetry stack? Not only in terms of the observing, but also the, from the deployment perspective.

So I got a huge interest, uh, in terms of like, uh, people coming in and asking like, how do we use the open source software? How you able to like manage the fleet of collectors? How you able to upgrade them?

How you able to get the maximum performance out of those collectors, right? So that, that's a, that's the area of interest among the, among the audience that I got basically asking about like the, the, what's the blueprint, right? Not essentially sausage making, but the blueprint, like how the high level concepts work, right?

Other, uh, other theme around the open security con was basically the way we do our software deployments in terms of CICD pipelines. How do you make sure that those images that we are deploying are free of critical vulnerabilities? How we are making sure that those images that we are actually taking from third party dependency softwares, they are trusted.

So what are, what's the process? How we are doing the, the trust in the zero sec in the zero security network architecture so that there is a, not only the software that we are running, but it's dependence also, we make sure that they are in compliance with our security compliance point of view. Right.

So those are the love it. Two manual things. Yes.

If I appreciate that. And you know, the nice thing is probably both of those were recorded, right? Yes.

So they'll be available to download, correct. On, on the, uh, CNC eCom website, CNCF website. Yes.

Let me ask another issue or another question for folks out there who are saying, you know, I, this platform engineering sounds interesting, I'd like to be a platform engineer. Yes. Or, you know, I considered that, give people a sense of your day to day as a platform engineer.

What do you work on? What do you Yes. What are some of the problems you're solving?

Yes. Like what, what is it like to be a platform engineer? Oh, I, so I came into platform engineering field when, right when Kubernetes was getting shaped up in 2015 era.

So it's been 10 years. And, uh, before then I was a software engineer. So coming from the engineering background, when I was a application developer, my knowledge, my skillset were only confined to that particular business domain level knowledge.

When I transition to platform engineer, my breadth of knowledge skill sets, not only in terms of the infrastructure, but how do we operate the services as a service operator, I was able to find out the business value because I today host many different applications that powers different critical user experience workflows on a, as a, as a operations engineer, I am able to make sense of why the services exist in the platform, how can we make it more performance in our infrastructure, develop development, and how can we power the, those developers to do their job efficiently? So it gives me a pleasure being a platform engineer, not only knowing the breadth of the, all the operations for those services that we operate on, but also powering them, enabling them in the, through the infrastructure in the cloud native way. So, yes, love it.

I, I enjoy my role at the platform engineering. Do you? Yes, very much.

Before platform engineering was a thing. What did you call yourself? I was a, a generalist software engineer.

So I was working on, uh, things like, um, video and coding. So I was, before my platform engineer, I had a background on writing the software that actually was in your mobile hand headset cells, for example, I'm talking about pre Android, pre iOS era, pre Apple era, where you used to have like a Nokia, hand handsets, blackberry hand handsets, and you had a very low power devices in terms of the capabilities back then because the compute, how you're able to render your media playback on your, on your handheld sets. I was working on those media encryption and audio compression algorithms back then and my contributions then actually got open sourced to the Oh oh, to the Android.

Oh, that's great. So the android, the first Android version 2008 that came out was running the software that I worked on The You york time. Yes.

So good for you man. Yes. Thank you for that.

Yes. Alright. Hey, we gotta wrap up.

Yes, go. Thank you. A pleasure for coming on.

Thank you for what you do for the community. Thank you. Hey, that's gonna wrap up CubeCon day three here, man.

I hope you've enjoyed it, Atlanta. We will miss you. Uh, we'll be back tomorrow with our regular tech strong tv.

But for now, this is Alan Shimmel. We're out.