Vara Bonthu

I'm the person companies call when their data platform is on fire — or when they want to make sure it never is. Over a decade working on large-scale data infrastructure across finance, retail, and technology, I've run into every flavor of Spark OOM, Flink checkpoint storm, and Trino memory cascade you can imagine.

At AWS I work with some of the biggest data engineering teams in the world — helping them design, migrate, and operate open-source data frameworks natively on Kubernetes and EKS. My focus is the gap between what the framework documentation says and what production actually demands.

Data Signal is that gap, documented. Real learnings from real incidents, real cost reviews, and real architecture decisions. If a signal is on this site, it's because I've either fixed that problem myself or sat in the war room while someone else fixed it.