Hello everyone, I’m Kishan Kavala and I live in Hyderabad, India. I joined ShapeBlue in March as a Cloud Architect. I started my career in 2004 working as a Java developer.
Before ShapeBlue
Prior to joining ShapeBlue, I worked with Amazon/AWS for 5 years, both in India and the UK. I worked with Public Sector and large financial institutions to help them adopt Cloud Computing. I also worked on an Amazon internal platform to move data across datastores at scale. I had the opportunity to work with CloudStack from 2010, while it was still VMOps. I was among the initial committers when the project was made open source under the ASF. It was my first experience with any open source project. Community discussions, contribution process and meetups were all very useful. I learned a lot about virtualizations, containers and networking while working with CloudStack. I also worked at CA (Computer Associates) and Citrix mostly in the Infrastructure domain.
Life at ShapeBlue
At ShapeBlue, I’m excited to have the opportunity to work with Apache CloudStack again. Being in a flat-structured company which is employee-owned keeps me motivated. I can see how my work impacts our customers. Everyone is empowered to provide inputs to the product roadmap and give feedback. All the colleagues at ShapeBlue are very approachable and helpful. It was nice to meet them all at SBCon23. We got to know each other better, understand different cultures and have a lot of fun. The weekly staff call with Drawasaurus is great fun. After the game, we share our weekly updates in the order of game standings. The lab setup at ShapeBlue is very efficient. It helps me focus on actual work and automates most of the build, packaging and infrastructure setup. I still remember the days when setting up a CloudStack environment used to take a lot of time, than the actual bug fix time or the feature development time.
Being in a remote-first company helps a lot to maintain my work-life balance. Especially, at this phase of my life with two young kids. I can make time to do the school runs every day and spend quality time with them.
Away from work, I love to play/watch cricket, football and badminton. I’m a Liverpool fan and had the opportunity to watch them play a few times at Anfield while working in the UK.
Looking forward
At ShapeBlue, I’m developing Object Storage framework for Apache CloudStack. I’m looking forward to making it part of the 4.19 release. I also would like to make more contributions to design and architecture discussions along with code contributions to the community. Apache CloudStack is a very stable product now. I see a lot of scope to build emerging technologies on top, with Apache CloudStack as an important building block. With the next CloudStack Collaboration Conference in Paris and local meet-ups across the globe, these are exciting times for CloudStack.
Kishan Kavala is a Software Architect by profession. He has vast experience in Infrastructure and Cloud domain, having working at companies like Citrix, AWS prior to joining ShapeBlue. He has been an Apache CloudStack committer since 2012. He is a sports enthusiast with a keen interest in football, cricket and badminton.
