Skip the ticket; show up anyway.

Tickets can be very expensive, and as a startup founder, I couldn’t justify spending thousands. So I decided to skip the ticket and just go to the same city where the trade show was happening. The best conversations often happen outside the event—in coffee shops, hotel lobbies, and nearby restaurants. Trust me, you don’t need to be inside the venue to make excellent connections.

Do the outreach beforehand.

Before I landed, I did my homework. I contacted people I knew would be attending, set up coffee meetings, and scheduled casual lunches. This took a bit of LinkedIn outreach and some emails, but it paid off. I had meaningful one-on-one conversations, all without the noisy, crowded exhibit floor.

Work the vicinity of the trade show

Most trade shows and conferences have an outside zone/seating for coffee and networking. I used that area to get work done, while keeping an eye out for people that I wanted to meet for a quick handshake. You never know who you’ll meet; those chance encounters can lead to big opportunities.

Focus on Relationships, Not Sales

Since I wasn’t under the pressure of having a booth or a big-ticket expense to justify, I focused on building real relationships. I wasn’t pushing for sales—I was simply meeting people, getting to know them, and finding ways to follow up later.

Ask Customers if You Can Represent Them

One creative way to attend trade shows without breaking the bank is by leveraging your existing customer relationships. It’s always worth asking your loyal customers or clients if you can tag along, represent them, or attend the event on their behalf. By doing this, you may gain free or discounted access to the event while still promoting your own brand. Customers attending the trade show might appreciate the additional representation, especially if they can’t send a full team themselves. This also gives you the chance to meet potential partners, prospects, or other companies in their network while staying within budget.

At the end of the trip, my total expenditure was a fraction of what it would’ve cost to attend the trade show officially. Flights, hotel stay, a few coffees, and a couple of lunches, but I still walked away with solid connections—and even potential deals. People want to see you in-person and showing up gives your brand credibility.

Throughout the years, fathers’ roles have changed significantly. Fathers were traditionally viewed as the family’s primary provider of income, acting as the family’s pillar. The expectations and responsibilities of modern fatherhood have been reshaped, nevertheless, by shifting perspectives and cultural changes.

Fathers are now more widely acknowledged as equal partners in raising children, actively contributing to their social, emotional, and intellectual growth. The days of dads being passive participants in the parenting process are long gone. Modern dads are taking a more involved role in raising their children, enjoying the rewards and difficulties of doing so with their spouses.

This evolution has been driven by a number of factors, including changing gender roles, a greater understanding of the importance of paternal involvement, and a desire for closer family ties. Fathers now realize the significant influence their presence and involvement can have on their kids’ development, self-worth, and general well-being.

Technology as a Parenting Tool

For modern fathers, the digital age has brought about a revolutionary shift in their parenting style. With so many tools and resources at their disposal, technology has emerged as a father’s greatest ally, enabling him to interact with his kids in ways never seen before.

Fathers no longer have to rely only on conventional parenting techniques or consult a small number of sources for guidance. They now have access to a wealth of information thanks to the internet and mobile devices, which helps them stay informed and make wise decisions about the growth, health, and general well-being of their children.

Additionally, dads now have more opportunities to strengthen their relationship with their kids through shared digital experiences thanks to technology. Dads can explore, learn, and play alongside their children on engaging platforms offered by interactive apps, educational games, and virtual reality environments. This fosters a stronger bond and understanding between the two parties.

One of the best examples of a contemporary, tech-savvy father embracing the opportunities and difficulties of raising a child in the digital age is Akshay Tomar, QA lead at LINK!. He has embraced technology as a father to improve his relationship with his child and have special moments together.

Using virtual assistants like Alexa is one way Akshay has made use of technology. He often gets his kid involved in things like watching cricket matches on their Alexa device and dancing to Punjabi music videos. These shared experiences help his child develop a love of sports and music while also exposing them to the wonders of technology at a young age.

Akshay thinks that his child’s development has greatly benefited from his increased involvement and presence at home, made possible by remote work opportunities. By spending more time together, Akshay has been able to share his passions, such as playing cricket and football, with his child. Because of his hands-on approach, his child has been able to develop a keen interest in these sports and skills, which has strengthened the bond between father and child.

Furthermore, he admits that technology plays a part in making parenting problems and questions simpler to solve. He understands that having so much information and resources at our disposal can enable parents to make better decisions and better meet the needs of their kids.

For Akshay, adopting the flexibility and work-life balance that technology provides is part of being a father in the modern digital era. He values being able to strike a balance between his work obligations and spending quality time with his child, making enduring memories and strengthening their relationship.

Work-Life Balance in the Digital Age

The digital era has revolutionized the way fathers approach work and family life. With the advent of remote work and flexible schedules, modern dads like Akshay can strike a better balance between their professional responsibilities and their roles as involved parents. Technology has empowered fathers to be more present in their children’s lives, fostering stronger bonds and creating cherished memories.

Akshay’s experience is a testament to this shift. As a QA lead at LINK, he can often work from home, allowing him to witness his child’s milestones and participate in their daily routines. This newfound flexibility enables him to be an active participant in his child’s upbringing, rather than merely a weekend presence.

Embracing the Digital Dad

For modern fathers, a transformative era has begun with the advent of the digital age. With the help of technology, fathers can now better balance work and personal life, connect with their kids through common interests, and use virtual assistants to help with parenting. 

Dads who embrace technology are better able to be involved, attentive, and aware of their kids’ needs. In addition, fathers can now teach their kids digital literacy skills so they are prepared for the future thanks to the digital landscape. Modern fathers can deepen their understanding of their children’s passions, build stronger bonds with them, and nurture their interests by skillfully incorporating technology into their parenting style.

Fathers who fully embrace technology will be in a better position to handle the challenges of contemporary parenting as the world changes. Through the effective use of digital tools and resources, parents can open up new possibilities for learning, connecting, and making enduring memories with their kids.

Controlling cloud infrastructure costs is critical for any company, but especially in the early stages of a startup. As you scale, cloud costs can easily spiral out of control if not properly managed. We learned this lesson early on when our AWS bill unexpectedly jumped 20% one month due to inefficient resource utilization.

After some research, we realized that using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools like Terraform could help abstract away the underlying cloud provider and allow us to seamlessly transition across AWS, Azure, and GCP. The key benefit was avoiding vendor lock-in – if one provider’s costs increased, we could easily switch to another without rewriting all our infrastructure code.

In this blog, We will walk through how we leveraged Terraform and related tooling to setup easy portability across cloud providers. This has been one of our best return on investment (ROI) decisions, already saving us over $500K in costs while retaining full flexibility to switch providers if needed.

Some key benefits we realized by using Terraform were:

Increased efficiency
Minimized configuration drift
Cost optimization
Collaboration
Reproducibility

Overall, adopting Terraform allowed us to implement IaC principles for provisioning and managing infrastructure efficiently. This increased our agility while reducing risks and costs associated with configuration drift.

Containerization with Kubernetes

By containerizing our application and adopting Kubernetes orchestration, we gain granular control over resource allocation and scalability. Kubernetes’ efficient resource management allows us to pack more workloads onto fewer resources, maximizing utilization and minimizing idle capacity.

Some key benefits we saw from using Kubernetes:

Dynamic resource allocation – We can specify resource requests and limits for each container, and Kubernetes will allocate cluster resources accordingly. This ensures containers get the resources they need without overprovisioning.

Horizontal scaling – We can easily scale our applications up and down by changing the number of pod replicas. Need to handle more users? Simply increase the number of pods.

Optimized hardware utilization – Kubernetes efficiently packs containers onto nodes, maximizing resource utilization. Features like bin packing ensure high density of containers per node.

Automatic bin packing – Kubernetes will automatically schedule containers based on resource requirements and availability, packing them efficiently onto available nodes.

Auto-scaling – Kubernetes allows scaling up or down based on metrics like CPU usage. This ensures we have just enough resources to meet demand.

Service discovery – Containers can easily find and talk to each other using Kubernetes services for discovery. This simplifies things and avoids manual IP address management.

Overall, Kubernetes gave us the flexibility and control we needed to maximize resource efficiency, optimize hardware utilization, and achieve scalability on demand. This in turn minimized idle capacity and helped us reduce infrastructure costs.

Cluster Autoscaler (CA)

The CA takes autoscaling a step further by managing the number of nodes in your Kubernetes cluster. If your cluster is running out of resources due to increased demand, the CA can automatically add new nodes to the cluster. Similarly, if the demand drops and there are unused nodes, the CA can remove them, reducing infrastructure costs.

The key benefits of the CA are:

Improved application availability – By automatically adding nodes when resource constrained, the CA prevents application downtime.

Optimized costs – Only running the number of nodes required to meet demand reduces infrastructure costs.

Automated management – No need for manual intervention to scale the node pool up and down.

The CA allows Kubernetes clusters to automatically scale based on actual resource usage metrics. This ensures high application availability while optimizing infrastructure costs.

Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA)

The HPA is responsible for automatically adjusting the number of pods in a deployment or replica set based on the observed CPU usage or custom metrics. This means that if your application is experiencing a sudden spike in demand, the HPA can scale up the number of pods to handle the increased load. Conversely, if the demand drops, the HPA can scale down the number of pods, reducing resource consumption and cost.

‍The HPA operates by periodically checking the current resource usage against the target resource utilisation. If the observed utilisation deviates from the target, the HPA adjusts the number of replicas accordingly. You can also configure the HPA to scale based on custom metrics, giving you even more control over your application’s scalability.

Vertical Pod Autoscaler (VPA)

While the HPA focuses on scaling the number of pods, the VPA is all about adjusting the resource limits for individual containers within a pod. This means that if a container is running out of memory or CPU, the VPA can automatically increase the resource limits, allowing the container to continue functioning without disruption.

‍The VPA operates by monitoring the resource usage of containers and comparing it to the current resource limits. If the observed usage is consistently higher or lower than the limits, the VPA recommends new resource limits for the containers. In some cases, the VPA can also automatically apply these recommendations, ensuring your application always has the right amount of resources

Spot Instances: For non-critical workloads and batch processing tasks, we utilized Spot Instances to take advantage of unused capacity at a fraction of the cost. This flexible approach helped us optimize costs while maximizing resource utilization.

KEDA Implementation

The Kubernetes pods were enabled to perform Horizontal Pod Autoscaling (HPA) based on CPU and memory utilization. The customer wanted to scale the Kubernetes pods to meet the requests coming in for deployment. This is similar in requirement to the native AWS auto-scaling behavior dependent on “requests per target group”

• Event-Driven Scaling: It enables automatic scaling of Kubernetes pods based on the number of events in event sources such as message queues (e.g., AWS SQS, Kafka)
• Scaling to Zero: It allows your Kubernetes pods to scale down to zero when there are no incoming events. This capability is crucial for serverless and event-driven architectures, where resources should only be allocated when there’s actual work to be done. Scaling to zero helps save costs and resources during idle periods.

Kubernetes Kustomize

Kubernetes Kustomize allows you to define and manage variations of Kubernetes configurations for different environments, such as development, staging, and production. This flexibility ensures that resources are provisioned appropriately for each environment, avoiding over-provisioning and unnecessary costs.

For example, you can use Kustomize to create customized Kubernetes manifests for your dev, test, and prod environments. The dev manifests may specify less compute resources, while the prod ones provision more resources to handle production workloads.

Kustomize lets you reuse common configuration components across environments while varying environment-specific settings like replica counts, memory/CPU limits, etc. You don’t have to maintain separate YAML files for each environment.

Instead, you can create a common base and overlay customizations for each environment. Kustomize will then generate the final manifests for you by merging the base and overlays.

This approach streamlines configuration management and ensures consistency across environments. By tailoring configurations to the specific needs of each environment, Kustomize helps optimize resource utilization and ultimately contributes to cost management in Kubernetes deployments.

ArgoCD:

ArgoCD indeed plays a significant role in cost optimization within Kubernetes environments. By automating the deployment and management of applications, ArgoCD reduces the reliance on manual intervention, thereby minimizing human errors and the associated costs of troubleshooting and rectifying them. Additionally, ArgoCD facilitates continuous delivery, ensuring that deployments are efficient, reliable, and consistent across different environments. This automation not only saves time but also optimizes resource utilization by enabling faster rollouts and updates. Overall, ArgoCD contributes to cost optimization in Kubernetes deployments by streamlining the deployment process, reducing operational overhead, and improving overall resource efficiency.

Overall, Terraform has been a huge win in terms of flexibility, productivity, and cost management. The key takeaway for readers is to invest time in learning Infrastructure as code practices and tools like Terraform. The long-term benefits are well worth it, especially as complexity and scale increase.

In the complex world of the global financial ecosystem, payment solutions serve as the intricate threads binding consumers and businesses. As digital transactions weave their way into every facet of our lives, scaling payment solutions to cater to diverse global markets becomes both an imperative and a challenge.

When I founded Link, it was with the recognition of the need for seamless integration in an increasingly interconnected world. Now, as the pace of globalization accelerates, payment providers find themselves navigating the challenging waters of regional regulations, varied consumer preferences, and the ever-present demand for security and speed.

Diverse Challenges in Diverse Markets

Each global market has its idiosyncrasies. While one region might prioritize the swiftness of a transaction, another may place a premium on multi-layered security checks. Some areas of the world still grapple with the challenges of internet connectivity, while others are pioneering the frontier of cryptocurrency transactions. A solution that works flawlessly in the bustling markets of Tokyo might falter in the rural landscapes of sub-Saharan Africa.

Embracing Integration for Seamless Expansion

For payment providers, the key to maneuvering these challenges lies in the power of robust integration. A well-integrated payment system ensures adaptability. It can smoothly align with regional banking systems, local e-commerce platforms, and consumer preferences, ensuring businesses can confidently step into new markets.

At LINK, our focus has always been on creating integration solutions that act as enablers. In the world of payments, this means ensuring that providers can expand their reach without being bogged down by the technical intricacies of each new market. By acting as the seamless bridge between disparate systems, robust integration ensures that payment solutions can be as global or as localized as necessary.

Opportunities Amidst Challenges

Despite the inherent challenges, the global market presents unparalleled opportunities. As emerging markets come online, there’s a vast demographic waiting to be tapped. For the discerning payment provider, each challenge in a new market can be flipped into an opportunity with the right integration strategy.

Concluding Thoughts

The future of payment solutions is not just digital; it’s global. As we stand on the cusp of this exciting new era, my journey with Link has reinforced my belief in the transformative power of integration. To my peers in the payment industry, as you chart your path across global markets, remember that robust integration might just be your most trusted ally.