SREday

Site Reliability, DevOps and Cloud

October 11, 2025 HCLTech, Chennai, India

1
Day
25+
Speakers
2
Tracks
200+
Attendees

SREday is a worldwide series of community events for engineers who build, ship and run modern software systems. Across cities around the world, we bring together people working in reliability, cloud, DevOps, observability and production engineering to share real-world experience, connect with their local community and explore how these disciplines are evolving in the age of AI.

Companies presenting:

Accenture, Cloud Foundry Foundation, CloudElu Labs, Ford Motor Company, Freshworks, FULL Creative, GuhaTek, IBM India Software Lab (ISL), Last9, Lloyds Banking Group, Microsoft, Nuclei, Sematext, Serverless Guru, Walmart, Zomato

Topics so far:

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Schedule

October 11, 2025 2 parallel tracks 9:30AM - 5PM Chennai, in-person
view as table
first room • Track track 1

09:30

Hemant Kamatgi

From Blind Spots to Brilliance: The Evolving Landscape of Observability

Ford Motor Company
Ever wonder how top teams keep complex systems running smoothly? This keynote will explore the current landscape of observability, moving beyond traditional pillars to embrace advanced techniques and holistic insights. We'll discuss how SRE teams are leveraging emerging technologies to navigate increasingly complex systems, transforming reactive firefighting into proactive engineering.... Read more

10:00

Coffee break

Main lobby

10:30

Mukta Aphale

The Hidden Cost of Telemetry at Scale

Last9
OpenTelemetry makes observability simple—add an agent and instantly see every service interaction. But this ease creates a hidden trap: teams instrument everything without considering the cost impact, leading to observability bills that consume 10-30% of infrastructure budgets. This talk exposes the real cost crisis behind modern telemetry data. We’ll examine actual cases where companies faced million-dollar annual monitoring bills, break down why high-cardinality metrics create exponential cost growth, and show proven techniques to cut expenses by 60-90% while maintaining full visibility. Through live demonstrations with real production scenarios, you’ll see how simple configuration mistakes create massive data volumes, then learn practical solutions: smart sampling that captures 100% of errors while reducing normal traffic by 95%, edge filtering that stops expensive data before it hits backends, and retention strategies that slash storage costs 60-80%. This isn’t about avoiding OpenTelemetry—it’s about using it smartly. You’ll gain actionable frameworks for cost-controlled implementation, team accountability models, and monitoring tools to prevent bill shock. Leave with battle-tested strategies from companies handling massive scale while controlling costs, plus a practical toolkit for cost-effective observability that finance teams will approve.... Read more

11:00

Ram Iyengar

Cloud Cost Optimization: What, Why, & How

Cloud Foundry Foundation
- **OpenCost** is an open-source tool designed to measure the **granular cost of cloud resources**. - It is **best suited for cloud-native environments**, but works across several cloud platforms. - While **everyone knows the basics of cost optimization**, few apply them **proactively**—they’re usually implemented **in retrospect**. - The **primary reason** for this reactive approach: - Lack of **situational awareness** - Insufficient **insight into granular resource costs** - Engineers can estimate **total costs** for compute instances and infrastructure stacks, but struggle with: - *What does a build cost?* - *What does a deploy cost?* - With the **rise of AI workloads**, costs are escalating. - More **responsibility falls on SRE teams** to estimate costs accurately and provide better cost visibility. ... Read more

11:30

Clarence Selestin

"The Rise of SRE AI Agents" - How AI Agents Are Redefining Reliability

Ford Motor Company
In an era of increasingly complex, distributed systems, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) teams are perpetually navigating a deluge of operational data, often battling manual toil, fragmented tools, and the relentless pressure of incident response. The traditional approach, while critical, often leaves SREs in a reactive stance, hindering proactive innovation and true operational excellence. This session will explore the transformative emergence of SRE AI Agents – intelligent, conversational systems designed to augment human SRE capabilities and fundamentally reshape how we build, monitor, and maintain reliable systems. We will delve into how these AI agents, powered by advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) and sophisticated data correlation, are moving beyond simple automation to become true "co-pilots" for reliability engineers.... Read more

12:00

Siva Bagavathi & Balaji Venkatesan

Observability 3.0: Where Human-Driven SRE Meets AIOps

GuhaTek
Modern systems are too dynamic for dashboards alone and too business-critical to leave to black-box automation. This session reframes “observability 3.0” as a sociotechnical practice that fuses human-driven SRE with pragmatic AIOps. We’ll explore how rich telemetry (metrics, logs, traces, profiles, and user signals) plus topology and domain context evolves from passive visibility into an active decision system. On the human side, SREs define intent via SLOs, failure hypotheses, and reliability narratives and design for explainability, guardrails, and post-incident learning. On the AI side, we’ll discuss how correlation, anomaly detection, event deduplication, and LLM-powered triage can cut noise and accelerate root-cause discovery, while runbook automation and safe auto-remediation handle the boring, reversible fixes. Expect concrete patterns: telemetry pipelines that feed feature stores, knowledge graphs that reflect real service topology, feedback loops that keep models honest, and governance that ensures AI augments not overrides SRE judgment. We’ll also cover common traps (data debt, alert fatigue, overfitting to incidents) and a rollout playbook that starts small and proves value quickly.... Read more

12:30

Lunch & networking

Main lobby

13:30

Sudip Chakraborty & Gaurav Chauhan

Mastering ECS at Scale: A Journey from Chaos to Control on 100% Spot Instances

Zomato
This is a story from the trenches of running one of India’s largest ECS fleets—serving millions of requests entirely on infrastructure that can disappear with just two minutes’ notice. We began with the “easy path” of a third-party managed solution, but as we scaled, it quickly became our biggest bottleneck and a massive cost center. This session is our journey of taking back control. We’ll share the hard-earned lessons from hitting undocumented AWS limits, battling against opaque “black box” algorithms, and enduring production outages that forced us to innovate. **You’ll learn how we:** - Built custom controllers and predictive scaling - Slashed instance boot times by 75% through EBS optimization - Developed a “25-second miracle” shutdown process All of this allowed us not just to survive—but to thrive—in the chaos of a 100% Spot environment, achieving **99.99% uptime** while cutting compute costs by **60%**. This is how we transformed ECS from a simple orchestrator into a battle-hardened, intelligent platform. ... Read more

14:00

Soham Chakraborty

Tracing under the hood: Inspecting Kubernetes cluster with Inspektor Gadget

Sematext
- **Debugging Kubernetes workloads** across ephemeral pods, nodes, and services is not straightforward, especially in real time. - **Traditional observability tools** provide high-level metrics, but lack the **depth and immediacy** needed to find root causes of elusive, low-level issues. - This is where **eBPF** and **Inspektor Gadget** excel. - [**Inspektor Gadget**](https://github.com/inspektor-gadget/inspektor-gadget) leverages **eBPF** to dynamically instrument the Linux kernel, providing: - Real-time insights into what’s happening inside a Kubernetes cluster - **No need to install agents** - The talk will cover how to use different gadgets from the **Inspektor Gadget toolkit** to observe: - TCP connections made by a pod - DNS requests - POSIX signals - Syscalls - Files opened by a pod - `traceloop` — a flight recorder for syscalls - And more - **Structure of the talk:** - Introduction to eBPF - Overview of the Inspektor Gadget suite - Live demos of different gadgets in action - Key takeaways for the audience: - How to simplify debugging difficult Kubernetes issues with Inspektor Gadget - How to capture output in a **user-friendly format** for later parsing ... Read more

14:30

Aditya Joshi

AI Beyond the Chat: MCP for Kubernetes

Walmart
Conversational AI has captured widespread attention, but the true potential of AI lies well beyond chatbots and dialogue systems. As enterprises look to build intelligent, adaptive systems, the ability to provide real-time, contextual understanding becomes essential. This is where Model Context Providers (MCPs) come in — systems designed to dynamically supply AI models with the contextual signals they need to make relevant, timely, and intelligent decisions. In this talk, we’ll explore the evolving role of MCPs in modern AI architectures and how they can be used not just to improve inference quality, but also to intelligently manage and orchestrate Kubernetes environments. By integrating context-aware models with cloud-native infrastructure, organizations can unlock powerful capabilities — from self-tuning systems and adaptive resource allocation to AI-driven automation across the stack. We’ll dive into: - What MCPs are and why they matter beyond chat interfaces - How to build MCP server - How MCP can be used for managing Kubernetes cluster - How to integrate MCP with tools vscode, Claude, etc.... Read more

15:00

Networking & sponsor crawl

Main lobby

15:30

Sanket Bisne

Kubernetes Under Siege: How Network Policies Defend Your Cluster

Lloyds Banking Group
This session is for SREs, DevOps engineers, and platform teams who want to strengthen Kubernetes security at the network layer. While cloud providers offer firewalls and service meshes, the last line of defense inside the cluster is Network Policies. The talk balances concepts + live demos and provides a clear journey: starting from the “default open cluster,” then step-by-step applying Network Policies to enforce strict communication. I will use Calico on GKE to illustrate examples, but the learnings apply to any Kubernetes distribution. The session ensures attendees leave with concrete policies they can apply to their workloads.... Read more

16:00

Guruprasad Murali & Balanganesh S

NightsWatch - The AI Assisted OnCall Triaging

Freshworks
NightsWatch is a CLI tool for managing lengthy SOP into executable commands. It simplifies on call operations for production infra. For devs, it is extensible, enabling to add new commands as SOPs evolve.During oncall triaging, who really wants read huge SOPs & run commands without a single mistake?... Read more

16:30

Vivek Anandaraman

Enterprise Observability at Scale: Metrics, Traces, and Profiling with Coroot

CloudElu Labs
Monitoring and observability at enterprise scale is challenging — especially when dealing with 500 VMs and 3 Kubernetes clusters totaling 1,500 nodes. In this session, I’ll share how we implemented full-stack observability using Coroot agents, collecting metrics, logs, traces, and CPU/memory profiles out-of-the-box with minimal operational overhead.... Read more

17:00

Wrap up

Scan each other's QR codes & head to a nearby pub!
second room • Track track 2

10:00

Coffee break

Main lobby

10:30

Bikram Debnath

Seeing the Unseen: Observability with OTel

IBM India Software Lab (ISL)
In modern applications, observability is essential. OpenTelemetry (OTel) has emerged as the standard for telemetry data, providing a unified way to collect, process, and export logs, metrics, and traces. Beyond data collection, organizations need effective ways to store, analyze, and visualize this telemetry to drive actionable insights. This session is for developers looking to deepen their understanding of OpenTelemetry's architecture and its three key pillars: logs, metrics, and traces. We will walk through how OTel fits into an observability stack, the benefits it brings, and common integration patterns. A small demonstration will showcase how telemetry data can be captured and visualized in practice. Audience Takeaway: A clear understanding of OpenTelemetry’s core components, how it supports observability across modern applications, and hands-on insights through a live demo.... Read more

11:00

Mahesh Venkataraman & Koushik Vijayaraghavan

STAMPing Out Outages: Applying MIT's STAMP/ STPA to Resilience Engineering in SRE

Accenture
```markdown Why should SREs care about systems thinking applied in aviation safety engineering? Modern distributed systems face the same challenges as complex safety-critical systems: emergent failures, cascading outages, and the gap between system design and runtime behavior. While traditional monitoring focuses on known failure modes, aviation safety engineering provides systematic approaches to identify unknown risks. In this talk, you will learn how we applied MIT's **System-Theoretic Process Analysis (STPA)** — a methodology from aviation safety — to analyze reliability risks in a large-scale eCommerce platform processing millions of transactions daily. **What you will learn:** - How to map STPA concepts (hazards, constraints, control actions) to distributed systems components - A systematic framework for identifying cascading failure scenarios before they occur - Practical techniques for analyzing interactions between auto-scaling, load balancing, and circuit breakers - How cascading failures were reduced using insights from this analysis - Actionable methods you can apply to your own systems **Real examples covered:** - Circuit breaker coordination failures that created retry storms - Auto-scaling feedback loops that amplified rather than dampened failures - Security policy interactions that blocked legitimate traffic during incidents - Configuration drift detection that prevented silent reliability degradation This is not theoretical — we'll show concrete code examples, architecture diagrams, and actual incident data. You'll leave with a practical toolkit for systematic reliability analysis that goes beyond traditional SRE approaches. Whether you are dealing with microservices, serverless architectures, or hybrid cloud deployments, this methodology will help you build and maintain more resilient systems by thinking systematically about failure modes and control structures. **Perfect for:** SREs, Platform Engineers, and Engineering Managers who want to move beyond reactive incident response to proactive reliability engineering. ``` ... Read more

11:30

Meiyappan Kannappa

Is Your AI Agent a Black Box? Here’s How to Open It

Ford Motor Company
Why can't you just use your old monitoring tools for your new AI systems? This session answers that question by introducing AI Observability. You'll learn how to use AIOps to move beyond guesswork and effectively manage your AI agents and infrastructure... Read more

12:00

Ganesh Padmanaban

Supercharging Performance Pipelines: JMeter Automation Meets GenAI Observation

GuhaTek
I’ve engineered an AI-powered Continuous Performance Testing pipeline: JMeter unleashed in GitLab CI/CD, Python-driven baseline magic, and Google Gemini LLM delivering smart insights. Real-time, action-ready alerts hit Slack—be the first to squash regressions! This talk reveals every step... Read more

12:30

Lunch & networking

Main lobby

13:30

Akshat Goel & Nishant Sarraff

Take Control of Your Runners: Architecting a 10× Cheaper, High‐Performance CI/CD Orchestrator

Zomato
What We’ll Cover - **Massive Scale Orchestration** - Executing **1M+ CI/CD jobs every month** across **600+ repositories** in multiple GitHub organizations. - Each workflow run triggers comprehensive validations, combining **open‐source tools** and **in‐house linters**. - Build-intensive repositories consuming **60–70 CPU cores per run**, showcasing CI/CD performance at extraordinary scale and speed. - **Solving Critical Edge Cases** - Managing **spot instance terminations** seamlessly. - Mitigating **GitHub API throttling** through **dedicated Apps and bots**. - Fortifying orchestration against cascading failures caused by unpredictable **GitHub service outages**. - **Cost Optimization** - Running CI/CD at **up to 10x lower cost** compared to GitHub-hosted runners. - Leveraging a mix of **spot and on-demand machines** with **smart bin-packing**. - Implementing **intelligent workflow filters** to eliminate unnecessary runs and maximize efficiency. - **Performance Enhancements** - Leveraging **caching of packages and builds** to speed up performance and reduce redundant work across workflows. - **Operational Standards** - Rolling out changes across multiple environments with **robust standards**, ensuring stability and reliability. Key Takeaways For Engineers and Operators: - **Scalable Infrastructure** Design **ephemeral ECS-based self-hosted runners** that handle massive CI/CD workloads effortlessly. - **Cost & Performance Optimization** Unlock strategies to **reduce costs** and **maximize efficiency** with self-hosted runners. - **Accelerated Job Runtimes** Improve **provisioning speed** and leverage **caching** for faster workflows. - **Automation & Standardization** Enforce **linters** and automate **standards across repositories**. - **End-to-End Deployment Cycle** Build deployment workflows with **safeguards**, **visibility**, and **approval gates**. - **Advanced Reliability Features** Implement automation to enhance reliability during deployments while reducing human intervention. GitHub Actions as a Unified Platform The talk emphasizes **GitHub Actions as a single platform for CI/CD**, streamlining workflows, improving developer experience, and eliminating the need for multiple tools. By sharing **Zomato’s journey**, we aim to **inspire practitioners** to rethink and enhance their own CI/CD setups—making them more **resilient**, **efficient**, and **developer-focused**.... Read more

14:00

Kaustubha Shravan

Taming the Chaos: Avoiding Kubernetes Landmines with Observability & AIOps

Microsoft
Kubernetes promises portability and scalability, but in reality, most production outages happen due to avoidable mistakes. Security gaps, misconfigured health checks, poor scaling strategies—all can derail even experienced teams. In this session, we’ll uncover: Security Disasters → The risk of running containers as root, overlooked image vulnerabilities, and RBAC pitfalls. Configuration Catastrophes → Why “works on my machine” never works, and how resource mismanagement wrecks clusters. Observability Blind Spots → Missing runtime security monitoring, misleading CPU/memory metrics, and logging anti-patterns. Scaling Traps → HPA-induced thrashing, node scheduling inefficiencies, and bottlenecks hidden until too late. But it’s not just about problems—we’ll explore solutions: Actionable hardening checklists Tools for continuous monitoring & runtime security Automation strategies to prevent config drift Proven observability practices for anomaly detection Whether you’re new to Kubernetes or running enterprise-scale clusters, you’ll leave this session with practical, battle-tested strategies to keep your systems safe, stable, and observable.... Read more

14:30

Manu Muraleedharan

Automating SRE with AI Agents

Serverless Guru
Imagine an AI Agent that detects production incidents from logs, finds a resolution runbook and resolves it autonomously. In this session, we’ll walk through the Strands Agents SDK and show how to create such an agent. We will use the RAG pattern to create a repository of Runbook knowledge. Then take it one step further by enabling the agent to call the tools so that the agent can resolve incidents autonomously. Increasing your peace of mind and accuracy, and reducing the MTTR at the same time. Walk away with actionable insights and a demo.... Read more

15:00

Networking & sponsor crawl

Main lobby

15:30

Ramprasath Asokan & Ullas C L

The Blameless Blueprint: Forging a Resilient SRE Culture

Nuclei
Let's be honest: "blameless culture" is easy to say, but hard to do. We've all been in those post-mortems where the air is thick with unsaid accusations and the search for a root cause feels more like a search for a scapegoat. What happens when good intentions clash with the messy reality of a production outage? This talk is our story of that journey. We'll share the gritty details of how we built a culture of psychological safety from the ground up. This isn't about theory; it's about the practical systems we put in place, from our rotating "First Incident Responder" role that turns on-call into a powerful learning opportunity, to our weekly Incident Response Reviews, a dedicated forum where engineers openly deconstruct failures without fear.... Read more

16:00

Jenisten Xavier

Unlocking Effortless Cloud Deployments: Workload Identity Federation in Action

FULL Creative
Managing secrets on the CI/CD pipelines is a constant challenge in cloud reliability. What if you could eliminate long-lived service account keys and still maintain seamless, secure deployments? My talk uncovers how Workload Identity Federation lets to securely connect with GitHub Actions workflows directly to Google Cloud Platform without compromising security or convenience. In my talk, I will deep dive into the following : * The challenges with traditional service account key management and secrets sprawl * How Workload Identity Federation leverages federated trust for secure, ephemeral access * Step-by-step setup of Workload Identity Federation between GitHub and GCP * Examples of configuring GitHub Actions workflows for reliable deployments * Practical tips, lessons learned, and troubleshooting common pitfalls... Read more

16:30

Wrap up

Scan each other's QR codes & head to a nearby pub!
Time first room second room
09:30 From Blind Spots to Brilliance: The Evolving Landscape of Observability
Hemant Kamatgi • Ford Motor Company
10:00 Coffee break
10:30 The Hidden Cost of Telemetry at Scale
Mukta Aphale • Last9
Seeing the Unseen: Observability with OTel
Bikram Debnath • IBM India Software Lab (ISL)
11:00 Cloud Cost Optimization: What, Why, & How
Ram Iyengar • Cloud Foundry Foundation
STAMPing Out Outages: Applying MIT's STAMP/ STPA to Resilience Engineering in SRE
Mahesh Venkataraman & Koushik Vijayaraghavan • Accenture
11:30 "The Rise of SRE AI Agents" - How AI Agents Are Redefining Reliability
Clarence Selestin • Ford Motor Company
Is Your AI Agent a Black Box? Here’s How to Open It
Meiyappan Kannappa • Ford Motor Company
12:00 Observability 3.0: Where Human-Driven SRE Meets AIOps
Siva Bagavathi & Balaji Venkatesan • GuhaTek
Supercharging Performance Pipelines: JMeter Automation Meets GenAI Observation
Ganesh Padmanaban • GuhaTek
12:30 Lunch & networking
13:30 Mastering ECS at Scale: A Journey from Chaos to Control on 100% Spot Instances
Sudip Chakraborty & Gaurav Chauhan • Zomato
Take Control of Your Runners: Architecting a 10× Cheaper, High‐Performance CI/CD Orchestrator
Akshat Goel & Nishant Sarraff • Zomato
14:00 Tracing under the hood: Inspecting Kubernetes cluster with Inspektor Gadget
Soham Chakraborty • Sematext
Taming the Chaos: Avoiding Kubernetes Landmines with Observability & AIOps
Kaustubha Shravan • Microsoft
14:30 AI Beyond the Chat: MCP for Kubernetes
Aditya Joshi • Walmart
Automating SRE with AI Agents
Manu Muraleedharan • Serverless Guru
15:00 Networking & sponsor crawl
15:30 Kubernetes Under Siege: How Network Policies Defend Your Cluster
Sanket Bisne • Lloyds Banking Group
The Blameless Blueprint: Forging a Resilient SRE Culture
Ramprasath Asokan & Ullas C L • Nuclei
16:00 NightsWatch - The AI Assisted OnCall Triaging
Guruprasad Murali & Balanganesh S • Freshworks
Unlocking Effortless Cloud Deployments: Workload Identity Federation in Action
Jenisten Xavier • FULL Creative
16:30 Enterprise Observability at Scale: Metrics, Traces, and Profiling with Coroot
Vivek Anandaraman • CloudElu Labs
Wrap up
17:00 Wrap up

Speakers

Aditya Joshi
Walmart
Akshat Goel
& Nishant Sarraff
Zomato
Bikram Debnath
IBM India Software Lab (ISL)
Clarence Selestin
Ford Motor Company
Ganesh Padmanaban
GuhaTek
Guruprasad Murali
& Balanganesh S
Freshworks
Hemant Kamatgi
Ford Motor Company
Jenisten Xavier
FULL Creative
Kaustubha Shravan
Microsoft
Mahesh Venkataraman & Koushik Vijayaraghavan
Accenture
Manu Muraleedharan
Serverless Guru
Meiyappan Kannappa
Ford Motor Company
Mukta Aphale
Last9
Ram Iyengar
Cloud Foundry Foundation
Ramprasath Asokan
& Ullas C L
Nuclei
Sanket Bisne
Lloyds Banking Group
Siva Bagavathi
& Balaji Venkatesan
GuhaTek
Soham Chakraborty
Sematext
Sudip Chakraborty
& Gaurav Chauhan
Zomato
Vivek Anandaraman
CloudElu Labs

Venue

HCLTech

138, 602/3, Medavakkam High Road, Elcot Sez, Sholinganallur,
Chennai, Tamil Nadu 600119

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