Lessons from Production

Grafana's CTO on Open Source, Observability & Building Real Value

I spoke with Tom Wilkie, CTO of Grafana about what it’s like scaling open source projects while building a commercial company around them. Discussed the challenges, lessons, and what goes on behind the scenes of a tool so many of us use. Want to be a guest on the show? I’m always looking to chat with builders, founders, and engineers working on interesting problems. Connect with me at contact@techwithkunal.com, I’d love to hear your story.

Scaling Open Source Databases

In this episode of Lessons from Production, I’m joined by Bhanu from TiDB and Nikhil from ElasticRun. We dive into what it really takes to run open source databases at scale, from architecture choices to reliability challenges, performance tuning, and real-world war stories. Whether you're managing distributed systems or just curious about how companies like ElasticRun use TiDB in production, there's a lot to learn from this one. TiDB Cloud free trial here [https://tidbcloud.com/free-trial/?utm_campaign=9756033-slg_0325_influencercampaign_apac&utm_source=influencer&utm_medium=paid_media&utm_content=kunal]. Shoutout to them for sponsoring this podcast. TiDB is an open-source, distributed SQL database built for real-time analytics on transactional data. It combines the best of both OLTP and OLAP, making it ideal for modern applications needing scale, speed, and flexibility. Want to be a guest on the show? I’m always looking to chat with builders, founders, and engineers working on interesting problems. Connect with me at contact@techwithkunal.com, I’d love to hear your story.

How to Achieve Cloud Cost Observability?

Observability has been the buzzword across the stack, and businesses are toiling hard to achieve end-to-end visibility. While tech observability is fairly mature, cloud cost observability remains a missing link. In this episode of Lessons from Production, I spoke with Ananth [https://www.linkedin.com/in/ananthkumarks/] from Zoho [https://www.site24x7.com/?utm_source=WeMakeDevs&utm_medium=Youtube&utm_campaign=video] (sponsoring this episode) as we dive into what cloud cost observability really means, how it's different from tech-stack observability, best practices to achieve it, and real-world case studies that show how it can drive informed business decisions. Want to be a guest on the show? I’m always looking to chat with builders, founders, and engineers working on interesting problems. Connect with me at contact@techwithkunal.com, I’d love to hear your story.

Making DevSecOps Work by Balancing Speed, Security & Scale

In this episode of Lessons from Production, I sit down with Mark Mishaev [https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-mishaev-64a25452/], Chief Architect at Checkmarx [https://checkmarx.com] (shoutout for sponsoring this episode), to talk about what it really takes to make DevSecOps work. We dive into the ongoing challenge of balancing speed, security, and scale; and why getting that balance right is key to building software that can grow and evolve safely.  From culture to tooling to team alignment, this conversation offers practical insights for anyone working to embed security without slowing down delivery. If you’re building modern software at any scale, this episode is packed with takeaways you’ll want to hear. Want to be a guest on the show? I’m always looking to chat with builders, founders, and engineers working on interesting problems. Connect with me at contact@techwithkunal.com, I’d love to hear your story.

Designing AI That Gets Out of Your Way

Sanskar started his journey as an open source contributor in India, moved to London to work at Bloomberg, and recently quit his job to move to San Francisco and build his own AI startup, Amurex [https://www.amurex.ai]. In this episode, we talk about that journey; and what it takes to build an AI assistant that’s actually helpful, personal, and respectful of your space. We also chat about how to make AI more transparent, how to deal with messy data, and how they keep up with the fast-changing AI world. If you're curious about where AI is headed and how thoughtful tools get built, give this one a listen. Want to be a guest on the show? I’m always looking to chat with builders, founders, and engineers working on interesting problems. Connect with me at contact@techwithkunal.com, I’d love to hear your story.