Unlocking Potential: Nikhita Kataria’s Insights on Cloud Infrastructure and Software Engineering
According to TechTarget, Cloud infrastructure refers to the hardware and software components — such as servers, storage, networking, virtualization software, services and management tools. The fields like cloud computing require efficient individuals who are responsive towards the ever changing trends and mounting challenges in IT sector. In this article, one such individual and her adventures are discussed.
Nikhita Kataria, as a professional, has worked with Meta and LinkedIn. Her work is not limited to theory. During her time at Meta, she served as a Grace Hopper Conference reviewer. The GHC is world’s largest gathering in Tech to promote women in STEM field. Here, she learnt about parallel programming, critical deployment and cloud infrastructure.
She informs that she reduced 5xx errors by 98% for a critical private cloud service managing deployment data at LinkedIn, along with saving hundreds of engineering hours by automating remediation of both stateless and stateful services in the private cloud. “…even if your code is lightning fast, if the underlying infrastructure isn’t rock-solid, you won’t scale”, she comments. An employee who works with actual turnovers and is not limited to mere presentations and analysis becomes a key of the organization.
Assigned with the responsibility of overseeing how much compute, memory, and storage each application on Kubernetes gets, ensuring resources are allocated efficiently, she made sure that the quota management prevents “noisy neighbor” issues, where one app uses too many resources and disrupts others. This ensures all LinkedIn applications run smoothly and reliably at scale.
Eventually holding the responsibilities of a manager, she displayed her potential at Operating System Upgrade Automation (OSUA). The program allowed the LinkedIn users t a fast and reliable upgrade without facing any major technical hurdle. Of course, it was not a one day or one person job and required back and forth and late night conferences, but with her dedication and that of her team, it was made possible. This particular event shed light on her skills, which set her apart.
In the Information field, it is quite common and easy to mess up. Nikhita’s work on strong disaster recovery with the immaculate accuracy of 99% is praiseworthy. Even during her master’s, she partnered with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The tag itself speaks volumes.
As advice to the young professionals, she speaks rather openly, “So yes, keep riding the AI wave. But don’t forget the ground beneath your feet, because without the right infrastructure, none of it scales.”
Nikhita Kataria has made significant contributions to cloud infrastructure at Meta and LinkedIn, where she improved deployment reliability, reduced 5xx errors by 98%, and automated service recovery to save engineering hours. At LinkedIn, she ensured smooth application performance by managing Kubernetes resource quotas and preventing noisy neighbor issues. Her leadership in Operating System Upgrade Automation enabled seamless system updates at scale. With experience spanning Meta, LinkedIn, and even NASA, she emphasizes the importance of strong infrastructure as the foundation for scalable innovation.
