The Call
The brief from the State (via CDT) was deceptively simple: keep services fast, secure, and available. In practice, that meant untangling complex data flows, preparing for unpredictable traffic, defending sensitive information, and proving compliance to public-sector standards—while making the experience feel effortless to citizens.
The First Principles
Tek Yantra began with a philosophy that would guide every choice:
- Design for burst; operate for calm.
- Treat data as a product, not exhaust.
- Automate toil so people can solve problems.
- Bake in governance and security from the first diagram.
The Scaffold: Azure as Reliable Muscle
The team standardized hosting on Microsoft Azure to gain proven reliability and elastic scale. But the cloud was a means, not the end: infrastructure was declared as code, capacity was right-sized for today and rehearsed for tomorrow, and failover paths were tested until “rollback” became boring.
Keeping the Data Honest: Pipeline Management
Citizens don’t see ETL, but they feel it when it fails. Tek Yantra rebuilt pipeline management so information moved cleanly between services—no brittle joins, no silent drops. Checksums and validations traveled with the data, and back-pressure protected downstream systems during spikes. The goal was simple: every record accounted for, every handoff verified.
Seeing Problems Before People Do: Monitoring & Control
Uptime isn’t just servers; it’s situational awareness. Tek Yantra layered real-time observability across the stack: golden signals, distributed tracing, service health, and anomaly detection that escalated the right alerts to the right people. Dashboards explained not only that something hurt, but where and why—which microservice, which dependency, which recent change.
Security That Stays Out of the Way
With citizen data on the line, security was woven through every layer: a hardened perimeter, least-privilege access, regular audits, continuous logging, and governance aligned to state standards. Controls were codified and repeatable—no heroics, no guesswork, just guardrails that kept everyone safe without slowing the work.
Recovery as Muscle Memory
Incidents happen; drama is optional. Tek Yantra implemented backup and disaster recovery with routine, verified restores and clearly documented runbooks. Recovery time fell because practice replaced panic, and teams knew exactly which steps to take in which order.
Tuning for the Real World
Performance wasn’t a one-off project. It was continuous optimization: query tuning, cache strategy, content delivery, and resource allocation refined in steady cycles. When traffic rose, elastic adjustments let the platform bend without breaking—absorbing surges while preserving a smooth citizen journey.
Compliance and Governance Without Friction
Public systems answer to the public. Tek Yantra embedded compliance and governance into everyday operations: auditable change management, policy-as-code, and documentation that stood up to scrutiny. Proving conformity stopped being a scramble and became a by-product of how the platform was built.
What Changed for Californians
Most people never thought about any of this—and that’s the point. Pages loaded, claims filed, statuses checked, employer services accessed. On phones late at night or desktops between shifts, the site simply worked. Fewer retries, fewer timeouts, less frustration—quiet victories that add up when the stakes are livelihoods.
What Changed for the State
Operations teams gained clarity and confidence. With better telemetry, incidents turned from mysteries into checklists. Capacity moved with demand; costs matched reality. Security and compliance were demonstrable, not debatable. Leadership saw continuity they could count on—supported by evidence, not anecdotes.
The Playbook Tek Yantra Leaves Behind
- Azure-based scalable hosting defined as code
- ETL pipelines with validation and back-pressure
- Real-time monitoring and tracing tied to services and deploys
- Defense-in-depth: firewalls, least-privilege, audits, logs
- Backups & DR with routine restore drills and boring rollbacks
- Ongoing performance tuning and autoscaling for peak stability
- Built-in compliance and governance aligned to state standards
The Quiet Ending
From 2019 through 2023, Tek Yantra’s mandate was to make the extraordinary feel ordinary: to meet surges with serenity and keep a vital public service open for everyone who needed it. The best measure of success? Most citizens never noticed the engineering at all. They just got what they came for.
Tek Yantra—engineering calm in a world that surges.
