Open Door's Director of Infrastructure Dinesh Sukhija

In this Sage Spotlight, Dinesh Sukhija, Director of Infrastructure at Opendoor, sheds light on the transformative impact Sagetap has had on his vendor evaluation process. With a focus on infrastructure, site reliability, and developer experience at Opendoor, Dinesh discusses the challenges of traditional vendor evaluation and how leveraging Sagetap has led to significant productivity gains, smarter decision-making, and a deeper understanding of the tools available in the market.

Key Takeaways

• Dinesh's Role and Challenges at Opendoor: Overseeing infrastructure, site reliability, and developer experience, Dinesh faces the constant challenge of efficiently evaluating vendors and tools, a process that traditionally took quarters with heavy involvement from various teams.
• Productivity Gains with Sagetap: Sagetap has drastically sped up the vendor evaluation process, allowing Dinesh and his team to quickly distill their needs and explore a wide range of products with minimal operational overhead.
• Breakthrough in Autonomous SRE Space: The introduction to Shoreline via Sagetap, a tool that automates problem identification and resolution in production environments, has been particularly impactful, enhancing operational efficiency and reducing costs.
• Leadership and Ethics: Dinesh highlights the importance of the leadership and ethics behind the products he evaluates, emphasizing his excitement for Shoreline due to its experienced leadership and the breadth of its capabilities.‍
• Innovations in Load and Performance Testing: Dinesh also discusses his interest in Mule Dev, an early-stage startup that revolutionizes load testing for APIs by simplifying data preparation and workload simulation, showcasing Sagetap's role in discovering cutting-edge solutions.‍
• Empowerment Through Sagetap: Sagetap's platform has empowered Dinesh to make informed decisions swiftly, positioning him as a knowledgeable leader in his field, and paving the way for the integration of innovative solutions that align with Opendoor's strategic goals.

Full Transcript

Dinesh Sukhija: My name is Dinesh Sukija. I'm the Director of Infrastructure at Opendoor. Uh, at Opendoor, my areas of expertise are cloud infrastructure, site reliability, and developer experience.

Part of my job is to constantly evaluate offerings and vendors. Um, in the infrastructure and the developer experience space,vendor evaluation is a constant pain point for us.

I remember a scenario where we're looking at some observability tooling and we spent like a whole quarter in defining what is it that we want to look for and took us like a whole quarter to evaluate four vendors,

and then it took us like a longer tail to make a decision. So that became a very heavy engagement for us. A lot of people involved. And that was my, that's how most of the evaluations looked like in the past.

Sahil Khanna: How has that changed today now that you're leveraging Sagetap?

Dinesh Sukhija: The productivity gain has been immense. The speed at which I've evaluated multiple vendors,

and really, distill what I needed has been a huge productivity boost.

I remember some of the products that I evaluated on your platform in the autonomous SRE space, which blew my mind to see that, hey, this could actually lower my operational overhead on, um, on call while doing this for infrastructure teams.

It just has increased my understanding of the various tooling, products, capabilities that are available in the market.

It makes me look smarter in front of my leadership Hey, this is a product that, you know, we could potentially integrate and very quickly understand what each of these can do.

One area that I'm quite excited about is the autonomous SRE space that can not only identify problems in my production environments, but at runtime, either automatically fix those issues or give me an automated runbook that my on call engineer can just execute through and fix.

Uh, and that vendor that actually does that is Shoreline, and I'm quite excited about Shoreline.

Right. So it not only improves your uptime reliability, but also reduces cost. And what excites me about this vendor is the leadership behind this product, uh, who have come from years of experience in managing massive scale services, uh, with, with public, uh, with the large public cloud provider, uh, the ethics that this company operates with, um, and just the sheer capabilities and the breadth of capabilities of this product.

So I'm quite excited about it.

Another one that I reviewed very recently, um, was for load and performance testing, um, Multiple.dev.

I think it's in a very early stage startup that can really speed up the way you do load testing for APIs. And the value proposition there is that it could simulate, uh, various different kinds of workloads for you very quickly. So if you have been in this load and performance testing space, you would know the biggest challenge there is preparation of the data and simulating the kind of test that a particular API could do.

And by just unloading a couple of packages, you could simulate that workload, for example, if you're testing a chat API, you could download a package that simulate chats for you, uh, and then a few, you know, lines of code, and it's all in like a, uh, it's all fully hosted, so you don't have to spend on your own infrastructure, uh, and you can simulate a lot of the capabilities.

So, yeah, Shoreline and, Multiple.dev is something that really comes to my mind.