Pravar Agrawal Technology & Travel

Rootconf Hyderabad

Dec 1 2019

Attending a Rootconf has always been on my list ever since I attended a workshop on TOR at HasGeek office earlier this year. In the month of August, I came to know about the Hyderabad edition of RootConf scheduled later this year in November.

Rootconf is all about discussing latest tech in the areas like DevOps, SRE, Distributed Systems and of course meeting some new people from the industry. This really helps in understanding how the variety of available tools are being used in different scenarios at various organizations. In RootConf, we get to know some of the industry’s best engineers from different organizations. A whole plethora of knowledge!

The event was scheduled to be on 16th November in T-Hub, IIIT Hyderabad(Telangana, India). This was my first visit to any RootConf and the campus is really beautiful and lush green. I happened to reach the venue a little early, well around 6:30 AM and only few volunteers were there for the early arrangements.

The event kicked off around 9:00 AM with the first talk on Observability and control theory. The first speaker had a distinct style of delivering the talk and the presentation was really engaging. In short, I was able to understand what he was trying to explain :). He mentioned how we, from the System Architecture point, tend to miss the preparedness about unknown failures. We prepare and report once the failure has been detected but how about reporting the failure even before it is about to occur? Observability is not failure centric, unlike monitoring.

Next talk was by a team from Flipkart on, their usage of P2P for fast object distribution. It was amazing to know how they have used peer-to-peer(P2P) in their product called, Shatabdi to solve problems like rate limiting, latency during object downloads, choking of network bandwidth. The speaker mentioned how they had been working on this tool over a year and now they have started to experience amazing results with Shatabdi’s usage internally.

RootConf also has a segment called BOF or Birds of Feathers where discussions happen around one particular topic amongst a group of enthusiasts. There were few BOF sessions organized parallely to the main talks as well. I attended one such BOF session on AIOps where healthy discussions were conducted on clubbing AI/ML with Operations these days to provide adaptive and better solutions. Apart from BOF, there were something called as Flash Talks. These were small talks not more than 5 minutes and in about half-an-hour timeframe, couple of speakers shared their experience. If you have missed on your chance in the main talks then Flash Talks could be the best way to share your thoughts. This was really good!

We had a working lunch of about 40 minutes and which gave us a chance to socialize with each other. There were few kiosks from Atlassian, UpCloud, Mozilla to explain attendees about their products and also there were some really nice give-aways like t-shirts, laptop stickers. We gotta love all those swag :D

The next round of talks began with talks on security and compliance by a speaker from Ironwasp Security which was followed by a BOF session. Discussions were held along with the attendees on maintaining standards of security in your organization. Few examples or incidents were shared as well to set the floor for discussion. Security is the only part which is ignored in the whole development cycle or is dealt with the least attention which should not be the case especially, when nowdays we are moving everything to cloud. The last talk was delivered by a speaker from Hotstar Tech, Mumbai. This talk was mainly centered around, how Hotstar handled the load of 25 million viewers during India Vs NewZeland Semifinal, earlier this year. He discussed challenges in scaling infrastructure for millions of viewers and how they overcome it. He also told about running gamedays kind of a mock test which prepares them for the actual gamedays and handle peak traffic.

The conference concluded with the briefing from HasGeek team and other organizers. It was really a good event, all thanks to HasGeek team, a one day tech festival I must say. When we get to know about the experiences from industry experts on how things are being handled, we realize it’s not that easy as it may look. Not just that, we are even able to relate or share some specific problems which we might have faced previously in our projects too. I got to know a whole bunch of different tools which I wasn’t aware of earlier. Hoping to continue this rhythm, will possibly attend the RootConf next year as well.

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