Hello all, my name is Kiran Chavala and I am a QA Software Engineer at ShapeBlue. I started at Shapeblue 6 months ago. I am based out of Bangalore, India, which is also known as Garden city and the Sillicon Valley of India. Before joining Shapeblue I was with Citrix and Persistent Systems as a Lead Support Engineer. I have been involved with Cloudstack since 2013, when the Cloudstack 4.3 release was out, and I have seen the product grow with many relevant features getting added to the product, thus keeping it up with the emerging Industry trends.
My job was to provide technical expertise and 24/7 support for a Private fork of Cloudstack called Citrix Cloud Platform, and other products like Xenserver, and Cloud Portal Business Manager. I was also involved with on-site production upgrades for customers’ environments. My job was basically to understand customer issues and resolve them as quickly as possible by coordinating and involving multiple stakeholders.
I always love to explore and try out different open-source s/w and technologies and write blogs about them. My other interests apart from technical stuff are hiking, cycling and playing badminton. I also love to read books, listen to podcasts, and binge-watch a lot of TV shows and movies. I have a 1-year-old daughter with whom I love to spend time.
Starting my new role at ShapeBlue
It has been a fantastic time so far with ShapeBlue and I’m enjoying the job, be it technical or socializing with my amazing colleagues who have vast experience with CloudStack. There is a self-paced onboarding guide which helps you get started with CloudStack and its features. My job primarily revolves around testing the new features that are developed by the developers and community members before it gets accepted to the next release of CloudStack.
Further to this, I work to identify and report the bugs with the product, find flaws with regards to the implementation of features and user experience, keep active on the mailing lists and GitHub. I also find that helping out people who are new to Cloudstack is a satisfying experience.
Everyone is encouraged to submit their ideas proposals and thoughts to an idea board on how to improve the product and stay relevant to the competition. Also, you are not limited to your job profile, and you are encouraged to learn stuff and grow in your career and contribute to various teams in the company.
ShapeBlue’s Unique Work Culture
Being in a flat structured company and a 100 % remote working company has been great experience, as it provides so much flexibility with work hours, and it’s a great way to maintain work-life balance. The yearly SbCon event is a great event to get in touch with all of the employees and have brainstorming discussions on topics you which are you are passionate about, as well as participate in fun activities!
As ShapeBlue is a 100 % employee-owned business, everyone is free to express their opinions and provide feedback on which direction the company should progress next.
Kiran Chavala is a software test engineer by profession.
His personal interests and hobbies are trying out various opensource and cncf projects and watching a ton of webseries/movies.
Kiran has experience in providing technical support on various issues related to Cloudstack.
He has a particular interest in blogging, hiking, cycling and listening to audiobooks, podcasts,
Kiran became part of ShapeBlue in 2023.
