In complex infrastructure environments, the worst problems aren’t the ones you catch. They’re the ones you didn’t anticipate. For Varun Kumar Reddy Gajjala, an expert production engineering manager and a senior IEEE member, avoiding late-stage surprises begins with an upstream mindset. He believes the future of reliability isn’t reactive. It’s designed from the first line of code.
Over the course of his career, Gajjala has built infrastructure that supports some of the largest-scale data systems in the world. Within the teams he’s led, his impact is most clearly seen in the systems that don’t go down, the developers who ship faster, and the engineering organizations that grow without slowing.
“You can’t throw code over the wall and expect it to be resilient,” he says. “You build it ready, or you build it twice.”
Production Starts with Design, Not Deployment
In many traditional development workflows, production concerns are delayed until the final sprint. Observability, load handling, and incident response often come in just before launch—or worse, after a failure. Gajjala has helped flip that model.
During a multi-year infrastructure transformation project, he led a six-person team responsible for scaling a distributed query platform that supports interactive analytics on petabytes of data. His team spearheaded the decommissioning of legacy clusters, rolled out new elastic compute-based infrastructure, and reduced release cycle time by more than 40 percent. That effort, spanning five years, involved deep collaboration across infrastructure, privacy, and platform teams.
The results were concrete: millions saved in infrastructure costs, on-call alert volumes dropped tenfold, and cluster bring-up times improved by 85 percent. These wins weren’t just technical—they changed how the organization worked.
“If your system works in dev but breaks in prod, it’s not production-ready. It’s not even done.”
Scaling Systems, Not Complexity
Gajjala’s leadership goes beyond performance metrics. His philosophy centers on empowering engineering teams to own production readiness without relying on gatekeeping. One way he did this was by driving the creation of internal tooling that enabled developers to conduct readiness self-assessments. These systems evaluated alert coverage, scaling thresholds, and deployment risks long before the first line of code was pushed to production.
As part of the large-scale infrastructure revamp at his company, he also helped implement the company’s first elastic capacity model for stateful systems, breaking away from traditional fixed resource allocation. This shift not only reduced cost but demonstrated the viability of elastic compute for other high-throughput platforms.
This kind of work demands precision. Migrating petabyte-scale workloads without downtime, while eliminating legacy systems with embedded privacy risks, required phased rollouts, automated regression testing, and carefully constructed fail-safes. Gajjala’s milestone-driven execution process ensured not just technical success but organizational alignment.
Reliability is a Team Sport
While his impact on systems is measurable, Gajjala, a judge for the Globee Technology Awards, also emphasizes the cultural shift needed to sustain production readiness at scale. He’s advocated for service owners to be accountable not only for their code, but for telemetry, alerts, and playbooks. Under his leadership, launch reviews evolved from simple checklists into collaborative design reviews that examined how services would behave under stress.
In his platform overhaul, this mindset helped teams build infrastructure that could anticipate failure—through synthetic traffic, chaos experiments, and targeted load tests. Post-migration, engineers weren’t just releasing faster – they were doing it with fewer SEVs, clearer ownership, and better operational insight.
“Reliability doesn’t happen by accident. It’s the result of habits, not heroics.”
For Varun Kumar Reddy Gajjala, a judge at The Sammy Awards hosted by the Business Intelligence Group, production readiness isn’t a postscript. It’s a design principle. It starts at the whiteboard, continues through development, and ends only when a system retires safely.
In a world where systems are expected to be always-on, Gajjala offers a simple truth: real readiness starts early.
