Shikha Srivsatava
Dstinguished Engineer and Master Inventor, IBM
Cary, North Carolina, United States
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Shikha Srivastava is a Distinguished Engineer and Master Inventor at IBM, recognized for her ability to translate complex challenges into elegant, scalable solutions across the hybrid multi-cloud landscape.
With deep expertise in platform engineering, SaaS architecture, and modern DevSecOps practices, Shikha has led groundbreaking initiatives that power some of IBM’s most strategic SaaS platforms. She is a passionate technologist and pragmatic innovator, holding numerous patents and earning six IBM Outstanding Technical Achievement Awards for her impact across global enterprise initiatives.
Shikha thrives at the intersection of technical depth and leadership, bringing together cross-functional teams to drive outcomes that matter—for businesses, developers, and their customers. Her work focuses on delivering resilient, secure, and high-performance platforms that embrace open source, AI, and cloud-native design.
Beyond engineering, Shikha is a respected voice in the industry. She’s been a speaker and panelist at premier conferences including MARS, DockerCon, KubeCon, Grace Hopper Celebration, DOES, Elasticon, and more, where she shares real-world insights on building modern software with purpose and scale. Explore her talks: Slideshare link: https://www.slideshare.net/ShikhaSrivastava10/presentations
If you're passionate about SaaS, AI, platforms, or simply making tech work better for people—Shikha’s perspective is one to follow.
Area of Expertise
Topics
Mastering the Cloud(s)
SaaS vendors face significant challenges in making their applications available across multiple clouds, such as complexity, cost management, security, performance, vendor lock-in, and talent shortages. Each cloud provider has unique infrastructure, pricing, and compliance requirements, making it difficult to manage resources and ensure consistency. Vendors must also address latency, disaster recovery, SLAs, and centralized monitoring.
To simplify this, my talk presents a platform approach for multi-cloud SaaS launch and provisioning. This platform offers centralized control, supports cloud-agnostic configurations, automates scaling, optimizes costs, and ensures security and compliance. Key features include:
Substrate Services: Foundational tools to run SaaS across clouds, integrated with cloud-native and vendor services.
Consistent Customer Experience: Seamless SaaS experience pre- and post-purchase, aligned with cloud-specific features.
Provider Consistency & Efficiency: Streamlined provisioning, management, and scaling across clouds, reducing complexity and maximizing economies of scale.
This approach allows SaaS vendors to focus on service delivery while simplifying multi-cloud operations.
Tackling the Multifaceted Challenges of Multi-Cloud SaaS Operations
SaaS vendors today are challenged to make their SaaS available in multiple clouds to meet the customers where they are.
Running a SaaS (Software as a Service) application across multiple cloud providers can offer benefits like redundancy, flexibility, and cost optimization, but it also presents several challenges. Here are some of the key challenges SaaS vendors face when operating in multiple cloud environments:
- Complexity and Heterogeneity: Each cloud provider has its own unique infrastructure, services, and APIs. Managing and coordinating resources across multiple clouds can be complex and require expertise in each platform.
- Cost Management: Each cloud provider has its own pricing model and cost structure. Keeping track of costs, optimizing resource allocation, and avoiding unexpected expenses can be a significant challenge. Tools and strategies for cost control are essential.
- Security and Compliance: Managing security across multiple clouds requires a comprehensive approach. You need to ensure that each cloud provider's security features are effectively configured and that data privacy and compliance requirements are met in all locations.
- Performance and Latency: Dealing with varying network latencies and performance characteristics in different cloud regions can be challenging. You may need to implement solutions such as Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) and load balancing to mitigate latency issues.
- Vendor Lock-In: Avoiding vendor lock-in is difficult when running in multiple clouds. You must design your architecture to be as cloud-agnostic as possible and be prepared for the potential migration of services or data between providers.
- Monitoring and Management: Centralized monitoring and management tools are critical for tracking performance, diagnosing issues, and managing resources effectively. Implementing consistent monitoring and management across multiple clouds is a challenge.
-. Disaster Recovery and Redundancy: Designing and implementing disaster recovery and redundancy strategies that work across multiple cloud providers is essential. This ensures that your SaaS remains available even during cloud provider outages or failures.
- Service Level Agreements (SLAs): Different cloud providers have different SLAs for their services. You must carefully understand and manage SLAs to meet the availability and performance expectations of your SaaS customers.
-. Talent and Training: Maintaining a team with expertise in multiple cloud
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environments can be difficult and expensive. Training or hiring personnel skilled in each cloud platform is a continual challenge. and more
To address these challenges, SaaS vendors should carefully plan their multi- cloud strategy, automate processes where possible, invest in cloud-agnostic solutions, and regularly review and update their architecture to adapt to changing cloud provider capabilities and requirements.
What I will discuss in this talk is a platform approach for multi-cloud SaaS launch and provisioning that simplifies the management and deployment of SaaS applications across different cloud providers. It offers centralized control, supports cloud-agnostic configurations, automates resource scaling, optimizes costs, and ensures security and compliance. The platform also provides monitoring, templates, and high availability options while mitigating vendor lock-in and promoting seamless data integration. This approach streamlines the process, allowing SaaS vendors to focus on delivering their services effectively.
The platform approach focuses on the following
1. substrate a set of foundational services for running SaaS in one or more clouds
- Composed of opinionated set of tools stitched together as an assembly
- Enabled to support SaaS in every cloud where SaaS is running
- Integration enabled with Cloud-native tools where applicable - Integration-enabled to Vendor services where applicable
2. Consistent SaaS Customer experience
- Enable consistent customer experience for SaaS pre-buy and post-buy - Align Customer’s SaaS experience with the Cloud experience where applicable
3. Consistent experience for a SaaS provider, economy of scale, and skill optimization towards provisioning and managing SaaS in multiple Clouds
Architectural Patterns for Devops and SRE Teams
Architecture is often defined as the layout and usage of components based on external and internal constraints. Devops and SRE Teams are built around any number of services, but as services and the organizational landscape changes, team architecture can and should change to find the right fit based on the external and internal forces. This session is a conceptual session discussing architecture team patterns, yet technical topics will be covered encompassing Devops and SRE responsibilities and tooling.
I Architecture and Devops/SRE Teams – 10 min
A. Architecture as a reflection of constraints
B. Devops and SRE teams as a reflection of constraints
II. Devops and SRE Team Architectural Patterns - 20 min
A. Single team single service
B. Disparate teams/services
C. Consolidation of services
D. Hybrid consolidation and disparation
E. Disparate teams and guild skill
F. Legacy systems and next gen consolidated teams
G. Consolidated legacy systems and separate next-gen teams – the goldfish bowl isolation of technical debt
III Summary and Q&A 15 min
Key takeaways are as follows:
**The types of Devops and SRE Team Architecture Patterns, patterns that describe team composition, responsibilities, interactions
**The constraints that may make some patterns more tolerable or desirable than others
**The downsides of some patterns or anti-patterns or contra indicated conditions where patterns may not be recommended
DevOps for 24 X 7 SaaS and disaster recover, Know what it takes before you leap into it
We've all heard of and practiced variations of disaster recovery methodologies for achieving 24 X 7 availability for SaaS applications. There is a range of dependencies for optimal RPO (recovery point objective) and RTO ( recovery time objective) including where the application is running, inter-dependencies of microservices, dependencies on datastores, and storage among others. Based on our experience of SaaS-ifying applications to run on hyperscalers, we are identifying patterns for our applications to adopt to optimize RPO (recovery point objective) and RTO ( recovery time objective).
We will describe our challenges, learning, and patterns for next-gen SaaS applications, and guidance on how to adopt them in the delivery of your next SaaS applications running in single or multiple clouds.
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