Venky Ganti

Cofounder, Alation

Search every verified Venky Ganti interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Venky Ganti, cofounder of Alation and founder and CEO of Mesh Dynamics, gave a presentation at GOTO Chicago 2020 alongside Rahul Lahiri on shifting testing earlier in the development lifecycle for microservices. Ganti described two trends driving engineering teams to take on additional testing responsibility: continuous testing driven by DevOps and the adoption of microservices architecture. He stated that the complexity of interactions among microservices increases the need for higher functional test coverage, and noted that engineering teams typically spend more than 25 percent of their effort on creating automated test suites. Ganti discussed limitations of existing approaches, saying that consumer tech companies' methods such as testing in production via canarying or traffic diff are "fairly late in the dev cycle" and may not converge quickly for enterprise applications with lower traffic. He presented Mesh Dynamics' approach, which he said leverages trace IDs injected at gateways and propagated downstream to simulate stateful services with high fidelity. Ganti stated that this enables teams to test in near-production environments early in development cycles, including within CI pipelines, allowing them to gain confidence and devote more effort to engineering new capabilities.