Overview
Om Prakash Singh is the VP of Technology at a global financial company, with 20+ years of experience shaping IT, DevOps, and infrastructure management. His journey spans a remarkable transformation from hotel management graduate to open source contributor, Linux system administrator, and eventually, a technology leader responsible for modernizing mission-critical infrastructure in a highly regulated industry.
What We Talk About
- Om Prakash’s non-linear career path, from hotel management to IT leadership, is driven by a deep curiosity and self-taught expertise in Linux and open-source communities.
- How evolving from physical servers and monolithic architectures to virtualization, containers, and Kubernetes laid the foundation for microservices-oriented enterprise environments.
- The difference between traditional monitoring and modern observability: why holistic, proactive system analysis is essential for today’s complex distributed systems.
- Practical outage management: embracing risk, defining acceptable downtime, and using observability tooling to perform root cause analysis and drive operational improvements.
- How self-service automation, infrastructure as code, and event-driven ops transformed operational efficiency—empowering application teams to manage deployments, patching, and scaling, resulting in a 70% reduction in operational workload.
- Personal leadership values, work-life balance, and continuous learning in a dynamic global team.
Podcast Highlights
Career as a Journey: Not a Destination
- Om Prakash’s story illustrates the value of building skills and staying curious, not simply following a prescriptive career path.
- He advocates for treating careers as long, evolving journeys—and urges young professionals to focus on learning and adaptability instead of rigid early-life choices.
- Success comes from experimenting across domains and leveraging transferable skills, regardless of formal background.
From Monoliths to Kubernetes: Transformation in Phases
- Infrastructure evolved: physical servers → virtualization → containerization → Kubernetes orchestration and microservices.
- Transitions were iterative, not abrupt, reducing risk and complexity for large-scale migrations.
- Modernization was only possible by layering each technological advance, building team expertise, and adapting organizational processes.
Observability for Modern Infrastructure
- Traditional monitoring is reactive—alert-driven, based on predefined thresholds or service downtime.
- True observability is holistic and proactive: integrating metrics, logs, and traces to surface not only what’s happening but why and how across distributed systems.
- In Kubernetes and modern platforms, observability helps teams understand internal system state, optimize performance, and rapidly diagnose outages.
Outage Management and Continuous Improvement
- Outages are inevitable; the focus is on defining acceptable limits and using each incident as a learning opportunity.
- Case example: pairing dashboards with observability helped root cause analysis, optimize backup routines, and minimize service disruptions during critical patching reducing backup downtime from 10 minutes to near-zero with queuing and selective service management.
Automation and Operational Efficiency
- Migrated from centralized operations to empowering application teams via self-service tools for deployments, scaling, and patching.
- Adopted infrastructure-as-code and GitLab CI/CD pipelines; moved from manual processes to event-driven and automated operations.
- Result: 70% operational workload reduction, enabling operational teams to focus on innovation and architecture.
Work, Leadership, and Inspiration
- Om Prakash balances a demanding global schedule through early routines and rigorous daily planning, prioritizing family and self-improvement alongside professional responsibilities.
- Inspired by diverse thought-leaders from Linus Torvalds to Bill Gates, embracing learnings from many while forging his own leadership path.
- If not in tech, he would run a catering business—blending passion for food and hospitality with service excellence.
Key Takeaway
Om Prakash Singh’s story demonstrates that success in technology is accessible to all who pursue skill and curiosity, regardless of starting point. His leadership in observability, automation, and team empowerment shows that reducing toil, encouraging experimentation, and applying holistic visibility are key to stability, transformation, and personal fulfillment in modern tech organizations