Mohan Sitaram is a seasoned technical leader with over 13 years of experience in software development and testing for large-scale systems. Throughout his career, Mohan has demonstrated a strong ability to understand complex, ambiguous customer use cases and lead cross-geographical teams to deliver innovative software solutions. He specializes in cloud-native distributed systems, having successfully managed projects on VMware vSphere, AWS and Microsoft Azure. In this interview, Mohan Sitaram shares his expert perspectives on the transformative impact of cloud technology on business operations, particularly in the context of remote work. Drawing on his extensive experience leading cross-geographical teams and working with cutting-edge cloud technologies, Mohan offers valuable insights into the advantages, challenges, and prospects of cloud-based collaboration.
As businesses continue to navigate the evolving landscape of remote work, Mohan’s expertise provides a roadmap for leveraging cloud tools to enhance productivity, streamline communication, and foster innovation across distributed teams. From discussing the role of SaaS and IaaS in enabling seamless collaboration to exploring the potential of emerging technologies like AI in reshaping the future of work, this article offers a comprehensive look at the intersection of cloud computing and modern business practices.
How has cloud technology transformed the way businesses operate, especially when it comes to remote work? Could you share some examples from your experience leading teams across different geographical locations?
Cloud technologies pre-date remote work. Email and instant messaging applications have existed for decades, long before remote work even became relevant, although we often don’t think of them as cloud technologies. Technology like online project management tools and video conferencing enabled teams to be distributed across the globe and still collaborate as a cohesive unit. However, the pandemic forced workers in nearly every industry to rely on these tools as it was physically impossible to collaborate in person, even for people in the same geographical location. SaaS companies like Zoom and Atlassian and their products became ubiquitous. Teams had to adapt to a rapidly changing culture where the quality and output of work could not be compromised despite being unable to go to a workplace. Hallway conversations were replaced by ad-hoc Slack channels, and daily “stand-up” meetings were discussed over shared Kanban boards on Zoom. Tech leads like me had to put on our project-manager hat and use tools like JIRA, Confluence, and code review platforms like GitLab to track team progress. Cloud companies that build video conferencing and online project management software have to ensure that their user experience meets the demands of a workforce that uses these tools more instinctively than before. IaaS companies like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google provide the computing, storage, and networking layers for SaaS companies like Zoom and Slack to innovate and deliver solutions rapidly to their consumers.
What are the biggest advantages cloud platforms offer in terms of collaboration and productivity for distributed teams? How have you leveraged these platforms to ensure smooth collaboration among your teams?
The biggest advantage for SaaS companies that build collaboration software is that they enable distributed teams to function as a single unit and not as disconnected silos. A video call on Zoom is a near equivalent substitute for an in-person meeting in a conference room. A virtual whiteboard on Zoom or Miro eliminates the need for gestures and obscure speech to convey a new design idea or troubleshoot a software bug.
For a technical software lead managing multiple projects, understanding the capabilities and limitations of the plethora of available collaboration tools is crucial to ensure success.
A tech lead may have to use more than one tool to streamline collaboration. For example, a project that spans several months and multiple engineers is best broken down into smaller tasks with definitive deadlines. Each task may involve multiple code commits from more than one engineer and the cumulative effect of these code commits ensures the completion of the tasks and eventually the project. But code commits are typically done using a cloud-based DevOps platform like Gitlab or GitHub and those alone are not sufficient for tracking the overall progress of the project. That gap could be filled by a service that is more suited to project management like Atlassian’s JIRA. There are also integrations between JIRA and Gitlab that provide a single pane of glass for the project lead and help them correlate the code commits with the tasks and the project. Without these platforms, cross-geographical teams would have to rely on first-generation collaboration technologies like email and chat and it’s not very difficult to imagine that team productivity would not have been the same had these innovations not taken place.
What challenges have you faced in ensuring efficiency and communication in a remote work setup? How did you overcome these challenges, especially with teams working across different time zones? How do cloud technologies help in this regard?
The main challenge is ensuring that distributed colleagues have the necessary resources and information to carry out their tasks and to make optimal use of meetings. Imagine a scenario where you have put together a new team for a new project and everybody works remotely. It can be very frustrating for all parties if they don’t have the means to collaborate effectively.
In my personal experience, software engineers tend not to shy away from meetings as they can be a drain on individual productivity, and this is especially true for teams that are spread out across the globe with very little time overlap. So, I try to minimize meetings and focus on asynchronous collaboration. Peer code review is fundamental to software engineering and most companies use SaaS services like GitHub and GitLab to share code and review each other’s work without being in the same room. But offline discussions are only as helpful as one’s own written communication skills, so a meeting on Zoom or Microsoft Teams may be necessary too. Virtual whiteboarding has become commonplace with the advent of remote work and most cloud services like Zoom and Slack have capabilities to facilitate virtual collaboration. Such technologies reduce the need for meetings drastically and I have noticed that it has a profound positive effect on the productivity of teams based in different time zones.
An example of SaaS and IaaS cloud technologies coming together to enhance remote work experience is Miro (SaaS) and Amazon Web Services (IaaS). Miro is a popular cloud-based service that is powered by AWS and it is used by many as a digital canvas that allows distributed teams to collaborate virtually. The Miro service is spread across different regions and Availability Zones (AZ) on AWS and ensures low latency and a smooth user experience for distributed teams. AWS Availability Zones also provide fault tolerance and redundancy so that disruptions in the underlying physical network or to the physical infrastructure don’t affect the whiteboarding session and no data is lost.
For someone working in the field of cloud computing, lower-level cloud technologies are used by software developers like me to collaborate with others. Examples of such cloud infrastructure technologies are Virtual Machines (VMs), Remote Desktops or Virtual Desktops, Containers, and Kubernetes. These technologies help developers build applications on a shared cluster of machines and are accessed by network protocols like SSH and HTTP. Technologies like Containers and Kubernetes enable developers to build, package, and deploy applications as self-contained units on remote systems and allow them to deliver new features quickly. Collaborative engineering is greatly simplified because the remote systems are accessible to all developers and provide a shared space to build, integrate, and test their applications. Debugging sessions can be done asynchronously by accessing the shared cluster and no information is lost because no context is stored locally.
In your opinion, how has cloud technology improved the overall flexibility and scalability of business operations, particularly during the shift to remote work?
Cloud providers like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure provide the core infrastructure for consumer-facing application companies like Zoom to build, run, and monitor their applications. The application company can focus on building the application and adding new features rather than the non-functional requirements like speed, reliability, security, and application availability. Cloud providers are adept at handling these lower-level requirements and provide easy-to-use APIs that application developers can leverage to build the application. For example, Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) can automatically increase or decrease compute based on usage patterns. A service like Zoom that runs on AWS can then define a policy to scale up the amount of computing and memory depending on the time of day when the user activity is expected to surge. This in turn allows the users of Zoom to collaborate at a high rate of productivity by adding participants on demand without worrying about overloading the Zoom application. Remote work has never been easier due to the seamless user experience and flexibility that these cloud technologies enable.
Another example is Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, which eliminates the need for employees to install software on their laptops and phones. With VDI, one can log in to a Virtual Desktop instance that is running on a server in a data center and have access to all the software and tools necessary to perform their work. VDI also allows users to access company systems from any device: mobile or laptop. Using VDI, businesses can centralize their IT infrastructure which may be more cost-effective than procuring devices for every employee and installing and securing applications on each of those devices, and thus scale faster.
Many organizations had to transition to remote work rapidly. What advice would you give companies looking to optimize their use of cloud tools for better remote collaboration in 2024?
The key is to have a good balance between SaaS services like Microsoft Teams, Slack, Zoom, etc., and services like VDI, that run in private data centers. Startups tend to invest more in SaaS solutions as Operational Expenditure (OpEx) is relatively lower than Capital Expenditure (CapEx) during the early stages of the company. And because there are fewer people, there are fewer concerns related to security and operations. But once the company grows beyond a certain size, SaaS solutions that run on public cloud become expensive and security and user management concerns start to grow. That is not to say that they should completely privatize all of their IT software as it’s neither easy nor cheap to do so. There is no single formula that works for everybody so companies need to carefully review their needs and expenditure and practice due diligence while performing a cost-benefit analysis. One such formula would be to use a SaaS service like Zoom for cases where user demand is expected to be unpredictable and use a private cloud tool like VMware VDI (Horizon) for more predictable use cases, as public cloud providers are experts at automatic scaling whereas scaling in private cloud is typically less nimble and needs planning.
Looking ahead, what do you think the next big innovation will be in cloud technology that will further reshape the way we work and collaborate?
Artificial Intelligence is quickly changing the technology landscape in several domains and it is likely going to be the biggest disruptor in the cloud computing sector. Generative AI is already being used by businesses and individuals to compose emails, documents, audio, and video. I expect more AI adoption by SaaS companies like Zoom, Slack, Asana, etc. and they are already using AI in the form of smart assistants. With regards to remote work and collaboration, companies might use generative AI to simplify the user experience by automatically generating meeting notes and summaries from a conference call, or producing software design diagrams and flowcharts for a future meeting provided a meeting agenda as input.
Such AI-empowered cloud services could also provide groundbreaking benefits to businesses in terms of growth. For example using prompt engineering, non-native English speakers can easily collaborate with their English-speaking counterparts which wouldn’t be possible without AI. These services might integrate more prompt engineering capabilities in their tools and allow businesses that use these services to accelerate their growth beyond linguistic barriers.
