Friday, July 27, 2018

Pet care at its best


“The better I get to know men, the more I find myself loving dogs.” – Charles De Gaulle

Tete-a-tete with Derek Demitrius, Founder of Pune Pet Park



For long, Lohegaon was better known for the Pune International Airport as also for 2 wing, one of India's oldest Air Force bases. Now the place is best known for Pune Pet Park, co-incidentally the brainchild of an ex-Air force maverick, a safe haven for pets that we discovered in the course of trying to do our bit for the wonder dog Ricky from our society premises.



Derek grew up in the cosy, reassuring company of dogs. His canine love became more pronounced when he joined the Indian Air Force in 1984 when he relished every opportunity to interact with and look after the dog squads. In 1995, he was released from the Air Force (not retired, as it was his own request to call it a day). A father of two sons, he eventually moved to Pune for good after spending a few years in New Delhi as a family man.

Derek did some crash courses and ended up becoming a merchandiser, and had brief stints as Country Manager for a couple of reputed companies. He eventually formed his own venture in the UK, a company called Black Scorpion Limited trading in interior accents like clocks, vases, furniture and the like. It were the Black Scorpion proceeds that went into the making of the Pet park project. When the financial needs of the park were beyond Black Scorpion's capacity, Derek dissolved the company and placed all faith in his inherent skills and competencies to get his pet project moving. He knew everything about developing a value chain of vendors and getting other things in place, but he lacked construction experience. So he spent time on research and soon found out that construction was no rocket science. With the right labour, you can achieve what seems impossible otherwise. Thus began an elaborate search on the internet: for designs, electrical fittings, plumbing, and drainage systems. Derek commenced construction on the site in March 2016 and completed the design, layout, electrification and plumbing of the entire park all by himself.


Today, Pune Pet Park has an Aviary, a walk-in Bird Cage approximately the size of one and half times of a 20 foot container, 12000 square feet of space for dogs to run around freely, a 600 foot cage-free, closed air conditioned kennel with another 2000 square feet play area around the kennel. Above all, the Pet park is also equipped with a crematorium and would soon incorporate an Incinerator, prayer Room and memory Room, probably the first for pets in India. Right now we are managing cremations with wood but would eventually move to gas.

The under-construction structures include a small cafeteria, a 4 feet deep, 2000 square feet swimming pool (one of the largest in India) complete with a filtration plant, a Dog Spa and a grooming parlour, Cattery to accommodate 14 cats at a time with individual suites, a rooster for Rabbits hamster and guinea Pigs, an emergency clinic to cater to vaccinations and small surgeries, a Pet store for sale of food and accessories. The entire facility should be full operational end of June next year.

Excerpts from the conversation with Derek:


On the inception of Pune Pet Park...


During 2006-7, Pune witnessed a remarkable inward migration, when co-habitation suddenly became an insurmountable problem. Before people realized, housing societies ceased to be 'co-operative', though the statutory nomenclature continued to suggest the contrary. These imposing residential structures now became an unabashed show of power, money, influence and lifestyle for most inhabitants. During this painful transition, a pet in the house proved a big solace for many emotionally drained individuals who had been suffering the wrath of their callous counterparts for long. Lonely and depressed, all they had for company was their pet dog or cat. The dog especially was now a family member who roamed about freely doing things he took for granted; among other things peeing and pooping at will. The owners had no qualms about this indulgence either.



This was the trigger point for people not used to what they believed were nasty things: doggy smell, poop pee et al. On the other hand, the pet owner likened the odour to the incense offered in a temple. This glaring divide between pet owners vs. non pet owners invited regular altercations between society dwellers. Pet owners hardly acknowledged the need to bathe their pets, clean up their litter while the non pet-owners were in no mood to relent either. What ensued was a huge squabble that has now been conveniently included under the generic term of "Animal Cruelty".

This dichotomy sparked the idea of incepting a Park dedicated to Pets, where people could let their pets poo and pee without causing civic disruption, and also learn more about their responsibilities as pet owners. Thus was born Pune Pet Park and the rest is history.


On the milestones of the Pet Park evolution...


In 2007, we (me and a close friend) used to meet every night at a place opposite Koregaon Park police station. Of the eleven dogs, three belonged to her and eight belonged to me, those that I had adopted or rescued. All dogs were basically pedigree, and the heartthrobs of many: one St Bernard, one Belgian Shepherd, one Labrador, two Pugs, one Havanese, one Corgi, one Mongrel and three Lhasas. These were lovely, harmless dogs who loved the outing and the freedom granted to them. In about a month's time, these 11 grew to almost 40 as others joined the rendezvous. The timing was perfect as, after a hard day at work, people found it refreshing to bring their pet out for a half an hour stroll.

Barely three month had passed when disaster struck. People began complaining against us, and soon they had people shouting more than dogs barking. Pune Mirror seized the opportunity and devoted a whole page report which completely threw things out of gear. The PI from the police station was very helpful as he was aware of our noble intentions. He gave us an alternate place but that didn't work out either. We then hired the Don Bosco Basket Ball court in Koregaon Park and restricted the socializing to weekends.



But that was not what I had planned for, so I began hunting for dedicated land for this purpose. In parallel, I conducted dog training and rehabilitation programs. I was time and again approached by PFA to handle some of their dogs. I was handed over the entire pack of Beagles from Lupin for acclimatization and rehabilitation. Although I was helping PFA, they didn't pay even for basics like dog food. I badly needed a place that would sustain itself, I he could no longer manage with his resources. I had to do something and I to do it fast.

We then changed our policies of adoption and made people bring in food or pay for vaccines if they wanted to adopt a pet. I thankfully realized this was a truly effective filter as we stopped getting calls from people that wanted a pet but did not want to pay to look after it. Thereafter, we were flooded only with genuine inquiries, from people who were really concerned about adopting a dog, willing to spend on it and treat it like a member of the family. This change was encouraging and I started scouting for places with fresh resolve. But most places were either too expensive or far-off from the city.

Then one day, I came across this awesome piece of land in Lohegaon. Since the prices were still high, I was initially looking only for 10000 square feet, but one look at the land, and my dreams got bigger. We measured 20,000 square feet to accommodate a pool and a kennel but something was still not right. It would be nothing compared to the kennels I had seen in the UK or on the net. So, we finally bought a whole corner of 34000 square feet on lease for 11 years, renewable for another 11 years.



On key challenges...

The foremost daunting challenge is Finance. In this country, entrepreneurs don't have many avenues for financing their dream projects, with sweet exceptions like those from the IT sector. Securing private investors for a project like this is very difficult but I have been persistent. We are almost 60% complete in construction terms. If we find a committed investor, we may be able to complete the entire construction year-end, else it will take another year to have this proof-of-concept fully ready.


On the appeal to the world at large...


In general, there are no Dog haters, unlike what the media loves to project. We do have one-off incidents that are not surprisingly blown out of proportion by the media for their own benefit. If you look after your dog well and make sure you clean up behind you, I am sure nobody would ever mind you having a dog. To the people conducting these so-called adoption camps, I have a humble plea: force each volunteer of yours to take a dog home, and you would never have any dog on the street. Stop being hypocrites and pass on a dog to someone with genuine love for pets!


On proposed expansion/diversification plans...



All said and done, Pune Pet Park is merely a proof of concept. I am yearning to see this project duplicated (not franchised) in Pune and other cities as well. I wish this projects grows into an industry by itself, and thankfully, I see lot of scope and potential for that to happen.

So that's Derek for you, a thought leader-practitioner, solitary reaper, dreamer and yet a pragmatist..

To the Venture capital/Private Equity fraternity out there, here's one project vying for your attention and money. Like there's sport beyond cricket, there are viable projects even beyond software setups, food delivery apps and e-commerce stores. Do a thorough due diligence of this project and if you are convinced, please help it grow to a size and scale it deserves. For more details visit http://www.punepetpark.com/

Thursday, July 26, 2018

Volte-face on the Volcker Rule


Courtesy: My thought piece in IIFL Wealth Global Newsletter

While industry lobbyists in the US have obviously different takes on the
Federal filing of proposed changes to the Volcker Rule regulations, it’s the
feasibility of rule’s stated objective, of keeping speculation largely out of
the bank’s sight if not mind, that merits a closer look all over again.

Sudhir Raikar

Born out of former Fed Chair Paul Volcker’s firm belief that speculation by
banks played a key role in the financial debacle post 2007, the Volcker Rule
bans proprietary trading by mega commercial banks, given that it inherently
puts tax-payer insured bank deposits at great risk. The rule disallows banks
certain investments on their own accounts, as also constricts their deals with
covered funds, primarily hedge funds and PE funds.
Part of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of the
Obama era, (which US President Donald Trump terms a ‘disaster’ with
characteristic disdain) this rule stirred up a hornet’s nest before its July 2015
implementation that was hence preceded by several revisions, exceptions and
even a lawsuit by community banks. Post the rollout, the ensuing ripples kept
the rule in the eye of the storm. Among others, many Wall Street banks were
forced to overhaul their trading operations and forego many big-ticket
investment vehicles. Another notable fallout, many experts claimed, was the
liquidity squeeze in fixed income markets. Revered trading pundits from top-
notch banks quit their jobs to fulfil their hedging aspirations elsewhere. While
many blamed the government for the brain drain, Volcker rule proponents
argued this exodus was in fact a good thing since it ushered in what they
believed was a new era of responsible banking.
Now in the Trump regime, responding to long-held grievances, federal
regulators are revisiting the Volcker Rule to simplify it and tailor compliance in
line with the exact need, i.e. more regulation of firms doing substantial trading
and fewer norms for firms with modest trades.
There’s a faction that believes this proposed amendment is a master plan
hatched in a friendlier political regime. They claim the big banks have teamed
up to denigrate the Volcker Rule under lame excuses like it affects their ability
to serve customer needs or would spell economic doom and invite recession
sooner or later. They claim the big fish among banks are keen to resume their
casino adventures and wish to minimise the number of watchdogs over them by
pushing for Fed to be the sole authority for the Volcker rule enforcement.

And then there are detractors on the other side who demand complete
elimination of the rule, which they say, overlooks the inherent perils of a
commercial bank loan, of placing customary risky bets on the borrower’s
credibility on depositor money that are more harmful than the hazards of
security trading. The Volcker rule, they hold, make banks even more vulnerable
in extending commercial loans and shoddy mortgage loans, in trying to make up
for the missed hedging opportunities. The 2008 crisis, they reason, had more to
do with Lehman and AIG debacles, not with the trade wings of banking biggies.
There’s obviously some merit in the claims on either side, but the crux of the
matter is the subjectivity of the subject matter – how does one distinguish
between a proprietary trade and a market making activity. And is it possible to
distinguish a hedge as either genuine or forbidden? In a typical banking
scenario, a banker can always make a strong case for risk mitigation when he
may actually be speculating on some event happening or not happening like for
instance a rise or fall in a currency bet. Would the new provisions counter that
sticky challenge, or would status quo prevail?

Agreed, making an all-encompassing regulation is never easy. The UK Vickers
draft reforms, that were supposed to be an answer to the Volcker rule, have been
scrapped by the EU, as it was grappling with the enormity of the criteria used to
force banks to split off trading activities, that many believed would create
instability and hinder investments. So, Britain would now go solo on Vickers in
forcing UK banks to ring-fence their retail deposits in a separately capitalised
subsidiary. The ring-fence sounds fine in theory - one bank with two
subsidiaries, retail and investment, almost separate but somewhat together - but
would it work in practice is anybody’s guess.

The ideal situation requires the bank to furnish a detailed explanation of how
specific hedges have been made against specific exposures. Which means the
regulator should be asking for crystal clear hedge-exposure linkages from every
bank. This gives hedging freedom to the bank but holds it accountable in the
same breath.

But reportedly, under the proposed revision, banks would be free to establish
their own risk limits for trades and determine the compliance of such trades
without the need to demonstrate before the regulators. The regulators would in
turn ensure that the banks’ risk limits are in line with customer demand.

Whether banks and regulators would play their parts as they should, or would
the minimal regulation inspire banks to unleash their risk-taking cravings, only
time would tell.

From Micro to Macro: Architecting sunrise possibilities


In an industry where buzzwords thrive on the periphery of the field of action before they transform into action, it’s imperative that we take a closer look at any emergent phenomenon before placing big bets on it. One such proposition is the Microservices architecture.





From the expert to the enthusiast, everyone talks of the Internet of Things (IoT). Even those who merely discussed things on the internet are now thinking of the world in IoT terms. But few from the business world are aware of one architecture that would be integral to most radical transformations in the tech world going forward. Although it’s gained prominence more in the context of IoT, its indisputable value prop soars high on its own merit. The Amazons and the Netflixes of the world have reaped rich rewards of scale and scope, thanks to the incredible support of Microservices that extends to the diverse worlds of web, mobile and other devices and comes with the promise of cost-effectiveness, rapid innovation, risk mitigation, and high flexibility. Closer home, the Wipros, Infosyses, Cognizants and TCSes are flaunting their Microservices philosophies in some depth. Industry body Nasscom hosted a focused workshop on Microservices Architecture last year for the benefit of Senior Developers, Solution Architects, Technical Architects and Tech managers.

It’s a good idea to be aware of the specifics of this architecture even for business stakeholders as it would only help spot the Next-gen winners from the software universe placing faith on this architecture before placing long term bets on their perceived propositions.

So, what are Microservices?

To answer that, we must first establish the litmus test of Enterprise Technology. It is the supreme quality of Change-readiness. In modern-day business, change is constant and instant and tech teams of established setups also need to be in start-up mode. Markets are getting wider, scaling out is the new norm, so is the adoption of emerging technology, which is no longer a matter of choice.

On the other hand, shrinking Time-to-Market calls for rapid development in distributed environments backed by continuous deployment.

Given that preface, let’s turn to the core value prop of Microservices which is its Change-friendliness. Their contexts and boundaries are defined in terms of distinct business capabilities.

They are right-sized, invariably small (think scope of service, not lines of code)
They are independently deployable in line with business needs: for instance, a new feature or a bug fix would be deployed immediately as also tracked for performance and behaviour.

Deployment decisions are choreographed in collaboration with service owners eliminating the need for orchestration across multiple teams which is invariably arduous. Service owners are free to choose the technologies and persistence mechanisms for building and operating individual services with consensus agreement on cross team parameters like log aggregation, monitoring and error-diagnosis. Services collaborate with each other using technology-agnostic network calls. They offer a cost-effective and low-risk test bed for evaluating the effectiveness of new technologies in production environments. 

One may be tempted to ask, what does all that mean for business?

A lot really! Among other things, scaling of operations now becomes ‘on-demand’ and cost-effective, exactly in line with business needs. Independent deployment, with quick failure isolation and rollbacks, ensures quick value delivery to the market. Ready-to-deploy business capabilities make customer engagement more holistic across different channels.

Smaller codebase means significantly lower risk and cost of replacing or rewiring software (vis-à-vis the typical monolith compromise of coping with core modules running on redundant technologies)

Microservices: The deal

How they deal with change in business requirements?

Unlike in monoliths, responsibilities are decomposed in respective services defined by business capabilities, hence change affects only the given module, data segments are API-encapsulated while service overlaps are mapped through higher-order services or hypermedia.

How they deal with business capability enhancements or modifications?

Bounded contexts enable independent deployment of the impacted service(s) without disturbing business capabilities residing in other services. This eliminates the need for time-consuming and costly regression tests of the monolith universe.

How they deal with situations where business abstractions are dependent on low-level services outside their bounded contexts?

‘API gateway’ inverts the dependencies between clients and microservices in this scenario. The secondary abstraction is declared by the high-level abstraction within its service interface and is implemented by the dependant collaborating services through several means - reducing network chattiness, performing protocol translations, concurrently aggregating service responses and transforming service responses in specific end-user formats.

A closer look at API gateways

In the microservice universe, a client’s RESTful HTTP request to individual services can be a painful user experience given the plethora of requests to different services.
Enter the API gateway which tailors APIs to client’s network capabilities.
For instance, a desktop client may make multiple calls while mobile client would make a single request. The API gateway will proxy finely-grained desktop requests to corresponding services while handling coarse-grained mobile requests by aggregating multiple service call results.

Outcome: optimized communication between clients and applications while encapsulation of microservice details. API Gateways ease the evolution of microservices: whether two microservices merge or one is partitioned into two, updation would be made at the API gateway-level, the clients on the other side of the gateway would be impervious to the change.

Why Microservices call for Continuous Deployment?

Microservices are highly amenable to change and continuous deployment makes it rapid and reliable. Microservices make deployment easier, so that it becomes faster and frequent. Faster deployment ensures faster feedback from the market.

Faster feedback ensures timely improvements – making it more responsive and secure.

Why Microservices and Polyglot Persistence go together?

The microservice approach of multiple teams managing discrete services naturally implies database capability within each service, else coupling at the data level would defeat the very purpose of autonomy.

Using multiple data stores invites eventual consistency which is a known compromise in most businesses. Even relational databases settle for eventual consistency when data is sent to or read from remote systems like value chain databases.

Like how RDBMS uses event streams for constructing reliable views, the microservice world uses event sourcing for triggering service updates from ‘events to log’. The trade-off in favour of high availability becomes even more acceptable when compared to the Multi-Version Concurrency Control issues of the relational world.

Embracing Microservices: No cookbook in the kitchen

Every organization is different – you can’t mirror success stories, or even failures for that matter. How to ensure whether microservices are fit for purpose. Microservices demand a paradigm shift - Cultural, Structural and Functional.

Compelling benefits come bundled with significant complexities.

The Adoption challenge

For Greenfield projects

When businesses need to evolve rapidly, the monolith environment may work best for managing small number of applications to deliver the firm’s competitive edge. Microservices however would be helpful to startups in building a minimum viable product.

For Brownfield projects

When established businesses need to scale rapidly across large, complex applications, microservices becomes fit for purpose but given the tangled dependencies between applications, an incremental approach to the evolution is highly advisable:

Getting in microservice mode calls for:

Defining core business capabilities for decomposition into services

Dissecting services in terms of business, processes, constraints, channels and data behaviours to be able to ‘group those things that change for the same reason’

Identifying capabilities to bridge skill gaps of technical team on emerging technologies and best practices

Questions that demand credible answers… a partial list

How does one move forward in the absence of standards?

How does one form the Microservice team – domain experts, technical architects, emerging tech champions, networking wizards…How does one bridge the skill gap?

How does one choose technologies, techniques, protocols, frameworks, and tools?

How does one approach design, development and deployment?

How does one identify services?

How does one define service boundaries?

How does one chip off services from the monolith structure?

Why and when does one split services, merge them, or create new services?

How does one deal with service interfaces?

Is there a way to ensure a uniform way to call services?

How does one ensure the quality of code bases given the fact that small doesn’t automatically guarantee quality?

How does one build coherence and reusability across different components?

How does one tackle the accidents post the ‘first version’ release?

How does one avoid versioning nightmares?

How does one adopt a culture of individual deployment s before evolving into continuous deployment mode: given the monolith legacy of single unit deployments and regression tests?


Summing up

Microservices are an evolutionary phenomenon, not a ready-to-deploy solution. They will ensure measurable value to an organization only if they are Fit for Purpose – irrespective of whether the project is Greenfield or Brownfield. Microservices Vs. Monolith is not a black and white David Vs. Goliath scenario. Both have distinct value props. Precisely why Microservice trade-offs should be guided by respective trade realities, not merely by the experiences of other organizations.