Alok Nikhil
Co-founder and CTO of Omnistrate; previously at AWS, where he was the original technical author of Aurora Serverless.
LinkedInEpisodes featuring Alok Nikhil
Episode 37: BYOC Anywhere: 10 Principles for Secure Bring Your Own Cloud Deployment
Paul Paliychuk of Zep AI and Omnistrate co-founder Alok Nikhil lay out ten principles for secure Bring Your Own Cloud deployment: keep the data plane in the customer's account, connect without exposing it, swap static credentials for short-lived identity, and make vendor access revocable by design. They walk through the four levels of BYOC, what changes inside air-gapped environments, and why AI products hit the enterprise security bar far earlier in their life than previous generations of SaaS did. The episode closes with a live demo that turns a Helm chart into a BYOC offering with a self-service customer portal. If you are asking what BYOC means in practice, this is the checklist: the software runs in the customer's cloud account, the vendor operates it, and the customer keeps control of access.
Episode 35: The Founder's Guide to Scaling Open Source AI Products to Production on AWS
Omnistrate co-founders Kamal Gupta and Alok Nikhil map the road from open source adoption to revenue: the four ingredients of monetization (project, enterprise features, distribution, go-to-market) and the three business models open to open source AI companies, product-led growth, AWS Marketplace co-sell, and enterprise sales. Alok closes with a live demo that turns vLLM into a managed inference service with a self-service customer portal, showing why distribution needs a control plane and why a Marketplace listing alone gets you discovered but not paid.
Episode 20: The Agentic SaaS Executive Summit - Live Event
A live summit at AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas, hosted by Bill Tarr, with two panels. The first asks whether agentic AI is revolution, evolution or hype, with Shriram Sridharan of Rox, Guy Korland of FalkorDB, Mihir Pandya of Scale AI and Alok Nikhil of Omnistrate. It covers seat, usage and outcome-based pricing, the return of bring-your-own-cloud deployments, and enterprise demands for data lineage. The second covers commercializing open source with Peter Farkas and Peter Zaitsev of Percona, Gopi Duddi and Talina Shrotiya of Couchbase, and Kamal Gupta, including open core, license changes that cost communities trust, and foundation-owned projects such as Linux and Kubernetes. Founders deciding how to price agentic software or monetize open source can compare specific positions.