$ cat about.md
About
[PLACEHOLDER] — draft copy, edit freely
I'm Achanandhi — most people call me Acha. I live at the intersection of DevOps and DevRel: half my week is spent debugging Kubernetes clusters, the other half is spent telling other people how to debug theirs.
By day, I'm a DevOps Engineer on the TST-ICSR team at EY, where I keep infrastructure honest. Alongside that, I'm a Developer Advocate at Keploy, translating the unglamorous parts of testing and observability into things people actually want to read about.
Most of my energy outside work goes into the CNCF and cloud-native community — organizing meetups and generally trying to make the ecosystem less intimidating for the next person walking in.
Away from a terminal, I'm probably on a badminton court or a few chapters into a book — The Alchemist and Think Like a Monk are two I keep coming back to.
$ ls tools/
Tech Stack
$ history | grep talks
Talks
How We Stopped a Crypto-mining Attack in Kubernetes Caused by a Next.js RCE
June 19 2026A war story from the trenches: how an unpatched Next.js RCE became a foothold for a crypto-mining attack inside a Kubernetes cluster, and the detection-and-response playbook we used to shut it down.
OpenSearch for Indian Languages: A Tamil Search Engine Case Study
June 15 2026How we built a search engine that actually understands Tamil: the tokenization, analyzer, and indexing challenges of Indian languages in OpenSearch, and how we solved them.
Deploying Tiny AI Workloads on k3s Using WebAssembly
April 18 2026A hands-on look at running lightweight AI inference workloads on k3s clusters using WebAssembly, and why WASM turned out to be a compelling fit for edge and resource-constrained environments.
Platform Engineering in Practice: A Crossplane Demo
April 11 2026A live demo of building a self-service internal developer platform with Crossplane, turning cloud infrastructure into simple, composable APIs for application teams.
Is Writing Code Really Enough for Open Source?
January 10 2026I shared my personal experience with the often-overlooked, non-technical contributions that keep open source alive — documentation, communication, community support, and empathy. The talk was for anyone who wants to be part of open source, even if they don't write a single line of code.
$ ls -la in-the-wild/
In the Wild
Moments from stages, booths, and meetups — click any photo for a closer look.
$ ls meetups/
Meetups
Search Reimagined: AI, Speed & Reliability
June 20 2026The OpenSearch Chennai community came together for another meetup dedicated to modern search engineering, covering everything from building AI-powered applications to optimizing search performance and handling real-world operational challenges.
Next-Gen Kubernetes: AI-Assisted Debugging and Node Readiness Innovations
June 6, 2026This online session covered two topics at the sharp edge of running Kubernetes in production: using AI to speed up debugging when something breaks in the cluster, and recent innovations in how nodes signal they're actually ready to take traffic.
From Caching to AI Systems - The First Valkey Meetup Bengaluru
May 23, 2026The very first Valkey meetup in Namma Bengaluru — a morning filled with conversations around open source, AI infrastructure, distributed systems, real-time architectures, and the rapidly growing Valkey ecosystem.
From Caching to AI & IIoT Systems - The First Valkey Meetup Chennai
May 23, 2026Brought the Valkey community together in Chennai for a morning of learning, networking, and discussion around the future of modern infrastructure.
From Code to Cluster: Building and Securing Cloud-Native Systems
April 25, 2026Kicked off the CNCF Cloud Native Mysuru chapter with a deep dive into how modern cloud-native systems are built, deployed, and secured in the real world. The session brought together practitioners to walk through the end-to-end journey from code to production, along with the security challenges that come up along the way.
Data, AI & Observability Meetup
April 4 2026An engaging community gathering that explored the world of search, data platforms, and observability, and looked at how OpenSearch powers modern applications at scale.
Agentic Search, RAG & Observability with OpenSearch – Bengaluru
2026An engaging session that dove deep into the world of search, observability, security, agentic search, and AI agents — and looked at how OpenSearch is powering modern applications.
$ gh repo list
Open Source Contributions
Contributions by Year
Kubecon-India-2026-Demo
2026The demo repo behind my KubeCon India 2026 talk — reproducing the crypto-mining attack end-to-end with the detection and response tooling used to stop it.
Upstream PRs & contributions
2025[PLACEHOLDER] Add notable 2025 PRs and contributions here (Keploy, Buildpacks, OpenSearch, Valkey…) with links to the merged work.
Most of what I ship publicly lives on GitHub.
View GitHub Profile$ cat advocacy.md
Projects
[PLACEHOLDER] copy below (including this line) is a draft — edit freely
A few open-source projects I actively champion in the community — not because I have to, but because I use them and believe in them.
Valkey
Valkey is the open-source, community-governed fork of Redis — a fast in-memory data store used for caching, queues, and real-time data.
Why I advocate for it
I like that Valkey exists because a community decided vendor lock-in wasn't acceptable. I talk about it because open governance matters as much as the tech itself.
OpenSearch
OpenSearch is an open-source search, analytics, and observability suite — a community-driven fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana.
Why I advocate for it
I've used OpenSearch to solve real problems, like building a Tamil-language search engine — that hands-on experience is why I keep advocating for it in the community.
$ git log --oneline --reverse booths/
Booth Duty
Valkey Booth
2026Represented Valkey at the booth, talking through the GenAI capabilities (valkey-search, semantic caching) and fielding the inevitable "wait, is this a Redis fork?" questions.
OpenSearch Booth
2026Ran the OpenSearch booth — demos, search relevance conversations, and a lot of interest in the Tamil language search work I'd been doing.
$ open --outbound
Blog
$ ./get-in-touch.sh
Let's Build Something Together
Whether it's a talk, a collaboration, or just to talk shop about Kubernetes — reach out. I'm quick to respond.