In 2026, AIops transforms SRE through 4 maturity stages—alert triage, automated remediation, predictive scaling, self-healing; mapped directly to production ops handling millions of events daily. Custom LLM runbooks crush vendor tools on repetitive toil (Kafka rebalance: 4h→17m MTTR, $0.02/incident, 96% accuracy) but fail spectacularly on complex scenarios (hallucinated kubectl during GPU OOM cascade → 3h outage). OpenTelemetry+LLM pipelines cut alert fatigue 68% but introduced embedding drift surprises. Drawing from 18 months production war stories: LLM etcd recovery runbooks delivered exact curl commands; tool constraints + chaos replay fixed hallucination failures; team velocity dipped 25% during reskilling then recovered +40%. Attendees get copy-paste RAG YAML templates, whitelisted command constraints, drift detection checklists (PSI>0.25), and 6-week LLMOps bootcamp roadmap—targeting >80% automation on top-5 incidents only.
Neel helps platform engineers and DevOps teams understand and adopt cloud-native infrastructure through talks, demos, and community building. I organise the CNCF Gandhinagar, HashiCorp UG Gandhinagar, and Google Cloud Gandhinagar communities, and I have spoken at 40+ events, including KubeCon India, PlatformCon, HashiTalks, OpenSearchCon Korea, FOSS ASIA, and LinuxFest Northwest. My core focus areas are Kubernetes, GitOps, IaC with Terraform/Vault, AI-powered DevOps tooling, and observability pipelines. I've mentored 15+ hackathons and open-source programmes. Certifications: GCP DevOps Professional, Azure AZ-104, FinOps Certified Engineer, Terraform Associate, Vault Associate.
