Balu Dontu
Senior Software Engineer at Roku
Palo Alto, California, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolBalu Dontu is a Senior Software Engineer with nine years of experience building cloud-native storage and distributed systems, currently leading the Big Data Platform at Roku after a multi-year tenure as a Senior Member of Technical Staff at VMware in Palo Alto. He designed and shipped core storage stacks for VMware Tanzu and led features across multiple vSphere CSI releases, including ReadWriteMany support, topology-aware volumes, and volume health integrations. An active upstream contributor, Balu has made substantive contributions to prominent repos like kubernetes/cloud-provider-vsphere and vmware/govmomi, adding SPBM and VSAN support, extensive volume management improvements, and robust test suites. He holds three patents in cloud-native storage, combines deep systems research (MS in CS from Stony Brook) with hands-on DevOps and backend engineering, and has direct production troubleshooting experience with customer environments. At Roku he leads teams operating high-throughput data platforms built on Kafka, Spark, Flink, Iceberg and Trino, blending distributed-systems rigor with large-scale data engineering. Colleagues rely on him for complex storage design, mentoring, and for translating novel algorithms and data structures into resilient production services.
9 years of coding experience
6 years of employment as a software developer
Master’s Degree Computer Science, Master’s Degree Computer Science at Stony Brook University, State University of New YorkBachelor's degree Computer Science, Bachelor's degree Computer Science at Osmania University
English, Hindi, Telugu
Github Skills (26)
unit-testing10
kubernetes10
vsphere10
testing10
cloud-infrastructure10
vmware10
go-testing10
go10
api10
cloud-platform10
kubernetes-pods10
service-provider10
cloud-services10
vaapi10
csi10
Programming languages (5)
Github contributions (5)
kubernetes-sigs/vsphere-csi-driver
May 2019 - Jun 2022
vSphere storage Container Storage Interface (CSI) plugin
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & DevOps Engineer
Back-end Developer & DevOps EngineerContributions:183 reviews, 81 commits, 41 PRs in 3 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Balu primarily focused on adding unit and integration tests for WCP and its Create Volume Implementation. They also worked on implementing the CNSOperator attach functionality and added a diskUUID constant to CnsNodeVmAttachment Types. Furthermore, the user implemented the Pod listener gRPC service and made changes to the main syncer file.
csi-plugincsi-drivercontainer-storage-interfacek8s-sig-cloud-providerkubernetes
kubernetes/cloud-provider-vsphere
Feb 2017 - Jan 2018
Kubernetes Cloud Provider for vSphere https://cloud-provider-vsphere.sigs.k8s.io
Role in this project:Back-end & Cloud Engineer
Back-end & Cloud EngineerContributions:12 commits, 6 comments in 11 months
Contributions summary:Balu primarily contributed to the `kubernetes/cloud-provider-vsphere` repository by implementing and fixing features related to volume management within a vSphere environment. Their work focused on enhancing the functionality of volume attachment, detachment, and provisioning, specifically addressing issues related to node presence and datastore selection. The user also added support for VSAN storage capabilities, including SPBM policy integration, and optimized volume creation processes and added bulk volume verification feature, along with several refactoring of the codebase.
providercloud-providerskubernetesk8svmware
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