About Subbu

I'm Venkatasubramanian — "Subbu" — a former Indian Air Force Squadron Leader who became a platform architect, infrastructure leader, and lifelong student of computing. My career runs from punch cards to Kubernetes, and from a flight line in the Indian Air Force to architecting dual-plane cloud-native runtimes.

From the Air Force to the Data Center

I joined the Indian Air Force as an Airman, graduated with a rare double promotion, and was later posted to the Air Headquarters Computer Centre — where mainframes, COBOL, FORTRAN and Assembly language became a lifelong fascination. I went on to earn a commission, was decorated with the CAS Commendation, and voluntarily retired as a Squadron Leader at the age of 38 to start a second career in technology.

That second career has spanned over two decades across Fidelity Investments, GE, Juniper Networks, NTT, Infosys, TMF, TOLL and others — touching software engineering, enterprise architecture, cloud computing, networking, storage, virtualization, automation and cybersecurity along the way. Forty-plus years tracking computing down to the bare metal, twenty-two of them in uniform.

What I Work On Now

Today I split my time between two demanding efforts. I'm the solo founder and infrastructure/architecture lead for Debutedge, a JSON-driven workflow runtime built on a dual-plane architecture — Cloudflare's edge alongside a self-hosted, on-premises Kubernetes stack, deployed as equal, production-grade peers rather than a primary and a fallback.

In parallel, I lead the ERPNext implementation for LEPL (Labha Engineering Private Limited), a precision aerospace and defence manufacturing company — designing the production infrastructure, from the Proxmox cluster and storage layout up through identity, SSO, and the application tier.

Outside client work, I run a serious self-hosted infrastructure stack at home — Proxmox, Kubernetes with ArgoCD, Keycloak, Harbor, Garage S3, Wazuh SIEM, n8n, and more — partly as a lab, partly because I believe production-grade self-hosting is a discipline worth keeping sharp.

Leadership

Assets are managed. Machines are managed. People are led.

I've never been particularly fond of the word "management." Throughout my career I've tried to build environments where talented people could flourish — and some of my proudest outcomes aren't systems or products, but people who grew into architects, directors, and leaders in their own right.

What I Believe

• Learning never stops, and curiosity compounds.
• Technology should serve people — not the other way around.
• People are led, not managed.
• Discipline beats talent when talent stops learning.
• The best leaders create more leaders.

I've been an Airman, a Squadron Leader, a programmer, a double postgraduate, an R&D Director, a technology executive, and a mentor. If I had to pick one title, it would be the simplest: student. After all these years, I'm still learning.