Scaling For Success: Prem Kumar Mani On Performance Engineering In Retail Tech
Today we are honoured to interview Mr Prem Kumar Mani, a dynamic contributor with over 17 years of experience in the IT industry, who has witnessed all the slightest changes in technology in retail. Prem has had a hand in many developments that mark the technological landscape of the retail sector, from having served as a developer to his present-day position as a senior leader in application security. His experience ranges from prime contributors like Walmart and Walgreens to Wipro, in areas like microservices, application security, scalability, cloud technology, and performance engineering.
In this interview, we delve into Prem's story, his experiences of scaling technology for the retail industry, and the particular lessons he has learned along the way.
Q1. So Prem, you have had a fantastic journey of over 17 years of experience in IT. Would you take us through the career journey that led up to your field of practice?
I began my career as a developer working with various languages and frameworks. This journey began while I was a part of Walmart which played a pivotal role in the adoption of new technologies like ATG Product Suite (Commerce). There was also a thrill as e-commerce started blossoming. I learned a lot about retail technology and the building blocks of making scalable, secure, and high-performance applications.
Later, I moved to Wipro as a Technical Lead, and there I undertook various high-value projects, majorly in e-commerce. That role gave me exposure to and participation in many other aspects of technology, including microservices and Cloud technologies. After that, I became the eCommerce Lead Engineer at Walgreens, and plenty of performance engineering and security initiatives resulted in further complexities.
All of these roles provided me with a strong foundation, and I was able to apply my knowledge across a variety of areas to help retailers scale their tech infrastructure and maintain performance.
Q2. Walmart and Walgreens have been quite notable in your endeavors, especially in performance engineering. Could you provide some insights from your time at Walmart, especially regarding ATG migrations and cloud technologies?
Walmart was quite interesting and helpful for me, especially while working with migration projects. One of the major hurdles I faced was apparatus migration for ATG. Here, I had to adapt to new systems and also transfer ways that provided minimal disruption to the company's daily operations. It was a lot more than just the execution of the migrations: business needed to be in the forefront of everything that was done. It was important that there would be no loss in customer experience as it was always a customer-first battle in retail.
When it comes to cloud technology, Walmart was moving from bare-metal servers to cloud platforms, the one big push towards modernization of infrastructure. I migrated over 15 applications seamlessly. Moving to the cloud also afforded immense scale, flexibility, and speed with which to deploy new features.
Q3. How have you solved scalability and performance issues in your various workplaces, given that this is critical in retail for the peak of consumer demands?
Scalability and performance are plausible in the retail sector where websites and applications face exponential spikes in traffic. In my community, I was responsible for ensuring that the platforms of Walmart and Walgreens could hold millions of concurrent users without losing any momentum during peak holidays or Black Friday sales. This required a thorough analysis of all types of infrastructure alongside the code.
For instance, as a performance engineer, I kept track of the performance of business-critical applications, helping provide rapid stress testing to unearth potential bottlenecks. We built a microservices-based architecture, which allows you to scale individual components rather than scaling the whole monolithic application. In addition, a well-imposed caching strategy, combined with load balancing, saw an improvement at a greater level of application performance. Moving to a cloud environment allowed us to achieve workloads with better load distribution and elasticity.
Q4. Security is very important, particularly in retail, where sensitive customer data is involved. Please share what initiatives you worked on at Walmart for the enhancement of security.
For me, security was one of the pillars for trust with customers. I considered it a priority in my role at Walmart. One of the primary areas I focused on was security being worked on while moving through development, from code writing to deployment. I led initiatives that caused the company to achieve one of the lowest BPS (basis points) on e-commerce business security in comparison to industry standards.
We adopted a multi-layered approach to security. At the perimeter and with depth, we made sure protections were on the applications. We also worked closely with our compliance teams to ensure that all our regulatory requirements were respected, especially concerning payment information.
Another thing was really focused on improving the security of the microservices architecture, which, in itself, posed its own set of challenges and opportunities in security. With this, we were able to implement security tools in the development environment to continuously scan the code for vulnerabilities so that we could discover and attend to any security issues possibly created before they made it to the production environment.
Q5. You spoke many times about adaptability, continuous learning, and leadership throughout your career. How have these impacted your valued approach to mentoring and the leading of teams?
Adaptability and continuous learning have served as the mainstay of my career. I've worked in tech, which changes what's lastly agreed on every two days. When I'm mentoring, the first thing I always say is, "Keep up with new trends, tools, or technologies." The competition is big in the tech industry, so the secret to keeping ahead of the pack is constant learning and being adaptable.
In terms of leadership, I abide by my principles of first 'walking the talk' and then empowering them to take ownership of their work. I try to create an environment where they know it's okay to innovate and take risks. No one wants to fail but rather create an environment to share ideas and knowledge.
Q6. Looking ahead, what do you believe will be the future of retail tech, especially in regard to performance engineering?
The future of retail tech is nothing short of exciting. As our stride goes into more personalized and embedded shopping experiences, performance engineering is compelling to be embedded into the heart of such experiences to deem them seamless. These will require scaling up of their IT infrastructure because of AI and machine learning combined with IoT for manufacturing more connected devices forming an intelligent technology layer.
We may continue to see them shifting toward cloud-native architecture, which offers varying degrees of flexibility and scale. Security will also remain on top of the mind; even as they collect more and more data about their users across platforms.
In short, the retail tech industry is poised for continued rapid growth, although the one constant is the focus of retail tech on performance, scalability, and security, that should place the retailers in a strong position to counter the competition.
About Prem Kumar Mani
Prem Kumar Mani is an established IT professional with more than 17 years of experience in the fields of microservices, application security, scalability, and cloud technology. Having executed high-end projects with companies such as WalMart and Walgreens, Prem was instrumental in pushing technological advancement and migration. Prem has extensive expertise in the ATG Product Suite (Commerce), Java, J2EE, leading initiatives in large scale migrations, cloud platform change, and the integration of security measures. He is known for his leadership, mentoring, and continuous learning-orientation towards innovation and customer satisfaction.
