Hello There!

I am Nishant Soni, born and raised in Mumbai (India). I have about 13 years of experience in the information technology field. Here’s a quick gist of what I’ve been involved in over the number of years.

  • 12 years ago - Began my career as a Linux Administrator. I worked with a bunch of web hosting companies offering shared web hosting, virtual private servers and dedicated servers. Responsibilites were mostly to ensure that the servers are always up and running and help clients with their concerns with “how-tos” and the usual troubleshooting.

  • 10 years ago - I realized that being good with just the Linux in general isn’t going to help my career. So I started learning programming, Python was the language of choice as its the easiest one to understand. I started working closely with the development teams to understand different approaches and how they solve their problems while building the applications.

  • 8 years ago - At this point, I was good with Linux in general and knew basics of programming. In comes cloud and the world changed. Everyone wanted to get on “AWS” “Azure” and others. So I started learning cloud to understand the advantages and tradeoffs (there are always tradeoffs). Today, its been almost 8 years since I’ve been involved with different cloud providers for infrastructure and network management.

  • 6 years ago - Combine everything that you’ve read above. I knew Linux, basic programming and cloud. The ideas of DevOps were already being discussed at the point, I just wasn’t aware of the terminologies. I got my first job as DevOps engineer and it all started to make sense. At this job, my primary role was to work closely with developement teams and setup their CI/CD pipelines so that the applications can be released without any human dependencies.

  • 5 years ago - Along with CI/CD pipelines, I began getting myself involved in enterprise level cloud infrastructure. At this point, I was introduced to the entire idea of infrastructure as code (so GitOps basically) and how that helps. I learnt different tools to solve different problems. So at this point, I was responsible for application lifecycle management and infrastructure automation.

  • 4 years ago - In comes containers! Although the underlying tech has been around for more than a couple of decades, I wonder why this never picked any traction or may be I am just not aware of it. Anyway, containers seemed to be the best choice in specific cases where applications were modern. Today, I’ve been working with containers for 4 years now. Obviously just containers weren’t enough, there were plenty of more things to go with it. Such as container images, docker compose, docker swarm, kubernetes, nomad and what not. I’ve worked with pretty much all of those tools for a few years now.

  • Today - So fast forward to this day. I currently work as a Senior Site Reliability Engineer. My primary responsibility is to manage, stabilize and improve the internal container orchestration platform which is build using Openshift. Yeah, we’re using Openshit here because of the nature of our business, it has to be on premise. However, during the past few years, I have handled pretty much everything on AWS (including EKS), Azure (including AKS) and a bit of Google cloud (just the GKE part). Apart from the primary responsibility, I usually get a lot of questions and calls about somebody’s pipelies not working, somebody’s docker image is too huge, some network issues and communication gaps and whatnot. Ofcourse not to forget the logging and monitoring for the visibility.

So that’s my story. If you did end up reading this thing through, then you would have noticed that I haven’t named any specific tools except for containers. The reason is that I’ve learnt over the years that new tools will replace the ones that you’re using in the future. So if one clings onto a specific tool instead of understanding the problem that it solves, its going to be difficult for that person to move on in the future. Also, just because a tool helps you right now, doesn’t mean it’ll be the best option for other problems (most recent example, docker and podman).

Well, thanks for reading I guess. Feel free to contact me on twitter if you want to have a quick chat.