About

Ayyappadas Ravindran, also known as Appu, is an experienced Director of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) at LinkedIn. With over 12.5 years of experience in the software industry, he has spent 9.5 years in DevOps roles and 3 years as an Engineering Manager, managing medium-sized teams. Appu is a subject matter expert in BigData technologies such as Hadoop, Hbase, Storm, Hive, and HiveServer, and has experience managing one of the largest Hadoop Clusters in the world at Yahoo!. Appu has worked with teams spread across the globe and has built SMEs in his team while effectively eliminating SPOKs. He has experience in recruiting, coaching, and building teams from the ground up, managing high-performance teams that deliver high-quality operational services on tight deadlines, and maintaining high team morale. He is an expert in product metrics, KPIs, risk assessment, and operational excellence of large-scale systems. Appu has a strong focus on technical best practices and a strong team culture. He has the ability to quickly and accurately determine critical engineering issues and delegate or nominate appropriate resources to resolve them. At times, he has directly developed solutions to those issues jointly with line personnel. He has expertise in large-scale web hosting and e-commerce platforms and has worked as a principal engineer for Yahoo! Small business platform. Appu has experience in implementing multiple methods to mitigate network-based distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS), dealing with HTTP brute force, ICMP Flood, SYN Flood, Malformed HTTP header attack, DNS brute force attack, and content-based abuse detection & mitigation. He has implemented tools to detect malware, virus distribution, phishing URLs, and malicious scripts. Appu is an expert in designing high-availability web hosting platforms by implementing GSLB & DNS anycast and has expertise in large-scale capacity analysis & planning. He has done capacity analysis & planning for multiple web hosting farms. Appu completed his B.Tech in Computer Science from Cochin University of Science and Technology in 2003. His tech stack includes SRE, Hadoop, DevOps, Web, Senior Software Engineer, and Apache Hive. With almost 20 years of relevant experience, Appu is a seasoned professional who brings a wealth of knowledge and expertise to any organization.