#61 - Mohit Gupta, CEO of Opas AI - On how AI delivers the dream of every IT Operation: Self-healing-systems

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to deliver upon the promise of self-healing systems. My guest is Mohit Gupta, Co-founder and CEO of Opas AI

Mohit has spent the last decade working on wide variety of interesting problems in Infrastructure, Big Data, and ML. He has run and managed infrastructure at massive scale and felt the pain of operating them firsthand. This pain, combined with his experience in Big Data and ML, led to the incubation of Opas AI. Before founding Opas AI, Mohit held multiple roles at BloomReach, Groupon, Google, and Amazon. He has a Bachelor's in CS from IIT Kharagpur and a Master's from UCDavis.

The vision behind Opas AI me to invite Mohit to my podcast: to create a single solution that can find, diagnose, and fix even the most complex performance and availability problems in your applications and infrastructure.

We explore the fact that today’s applications and infrastructure have evolved far faster than the technology used to measure and manage them. We dive into the challenges that this provides to IT teams as they drown under the weight of too many tools, too many dashboards and too many meaningless alerts, and most importantly, how technology such as AI and Machine Learning can help remove these challenges and risks for good.

Here are some of his quotes:

“We are in this journey of building self-healing systems.

It doesn't matter what kind of IT systems you're running.

The cost of failure has been growing higher and higher.

There was one thing in early 2000 if Amazon site was down for 15 minutes probably wouldn't turn up on New York Times homepage.

However, a few minutes outage on your site [today] can become a massive PR issue. And the cost is not only the lost revenue. That's definitely something that you see right away but the bigger cost is in the negative PR. And God save you if you are providing service to other SAAS providers.

We can win customers. We can buy contracts. But buying credibility, winning credibility is a long-term process. You may be doing very well for the last five years; a two-hour outage will basically wipe out that credibility.”

By listening to this interview, you will learn three things:

1. What are the key ingredients that are required to build self-healing systems 2. What the art of listening to customers really means – the key is not to hear what they are saying, but to understand what they are meaning 3. That you should be problem-focused, not solution-focused, to become truly successful