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**Alex Gallego:** My mind was blown when I went to college. And the caveat was I was the first one to go to college. And it was blown on two dimensions. One, I was never really challenged before until I went to college. I think school was easy. And then two, I met this person named Joel Wine, who was part of the distri... |
But to me, the best part about that experience was like "Well, he's just as smart as my friends." I was like "Why can't I do this? Why couldn't we change how the world works?" And a lot of it really just came down to trying. And so that was a big fundamental departure; I was like "Cryptography is fun", but in my head b... |
And so I actually left cryptography, went into distributed systems, went into a fast-scaling startup in New York for ads; it's called Yieldmo. Anyways, back then we used to own Forbes, MSNBC, Reuters etc. all of the mobile traffic, because frankly, we were better than Google at the time, and so as a young grad, the CEO... |
So my experience is now I guess 13 years into streaming, but it really came from this ad tech background where you're serving literally millions of impressions, then there's like a 10x panout in the backend with a bunch of pipelines, and things like that... And Concord was a compute framework, and then Redpanda became ... |
Streaming really is the combination of a little bit of compute, and storage, you sort of chain it together, and then at the end you have something useful. When I sold Concord to Akamai, I couldn't find a storage engine that was able to keep up with the volumes of data I was trying to do. And that whole experiment reall... |
\[10:02\] I remember there was a vendor that came to Akamai, they were selling \[unintelligible 00:10:04.22\] for 22-microseconds round trip at the tail latencies. And I built this product, but it was like 26 microseconds. And so chasing that performance edge was the humble beginnings of what eventually became Redpanda... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, that's -- did you say microseconds? Is that less than milliseconds? |
**Alex Gallego:** Yes. One microsecond is one thousand -- |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Break that down. How fast is that, really? |
**Alex Gallego:** So I guess a nanosecond is about like a page, like an 8 1/2 x 11 page the length of a page is a nanosecond, and so 1000 of those is a microsecond. So if you align those pages, 1000 of them, there's about a microsecond, which I guess in instruction is a few million, but in terms of really like a progra... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. Do you mind if we dig deep a little bit on the hardware side? I'm just curious how did you come to play with the actual hardware? Did you actually -- were you in the data center? Did you rack and stack - not so much like service to demand, but how did you... Were you in some sort of like works... |
**Alex Gallego:** Yeah, I have like three great stories. So one is, personally, after I sold Concord, I actually just bought a little three single U racks, and I put it in my Miami apartment, and then I just plugged it into the wall. And I needed that mostly to have access to profiling tools and kernel settings that ar... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** You needed direct access to the BIOS, and stuff like that. You needed full control, yeah. |
**Alex Gallego:** Yeah. Cache lines access, cache line misses, latency between, that sort of thing... And so there's a project called PMU Tools that allow you to measure much deeper, especially for an x86 processor, like whether you're top, or bottom-heavy. Basically, do you bottleneck on the instruction decoding, or o... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** "Can I get one?" |
**Alex Gallego:** Yes, exactly. \[unintelligible 00:13:29.06\] computers. And so I wrote it -- I actually open sourced a part of this work under a project called SMRF. That is like this RPC using the FlatBuffers; I patched the FlatBuffers compiler, I wrote a code generator for it... And it was really honestly just for ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** That's so interesting, how that begins with "How does this work?" Because we kind of got here to some degree through this description of obsession, these micro obsessions, at least in my case, and like you've built the company, I haven't... But it's just funny how you can sort of be super-curious, b... |
**Alex Gallego:** \[14:31\] Exactly. Well, in 2019 the funny part about this whole story is that -- so I'm in Miami, and I leave Akamai in I think late December 2018, or like January 1st 2019. Anyways, January 1st, for all intents and purposes. So I spend the month in my in my cave, which is really like my office. It's... |
And then I migrated to -- I guess I moved myself to San Francisco, because I didn't have a job. And it was fine, I was just trying to figure this out. I moved here, and honestly, it took off. The developers really loved the product. There was this need for something simpler. I think as a practitioner sometimes managing... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. |
**Alex Gallego:** So I was like "Okay, something's gotta be simpler." So I moved here, and the rest of the company kind of took off from there. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. And here is San Francisco. Okay, cool. You sold Concord to Akamai, you didn't have a job... Were you independently wealthy? Did you make out well in that transaction? Was it positive for you? I'm sure it was, so... |
**Alex Gallego:** So for context, we were three poor kids from Brooklyn before that. That is the truth. I knew how to write C++, but largely, I was living in Brooklyn, and I was broke. We built a really cool system, it was actually used by some of the largest financial organizations, and then Akamai were kind of in the... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, what I'm getting at really is the specifics less so, but more so the buffer it creates. And part of this show is just to not so much -- it's kind of to chronicle somebody's story like you, but also to sort of share a path that is possible. So you had an early exit that gave you buffer to essen... |
**Alex Gallego:** \[18:09\] It did, it gave me a buffer, but I think maybe more importantly, it allowed to be more ambitious and dream a little bigger. And I know it seems cheesy, but the context is I am a first-generation immigrant; you kind of have to take baby steps sometimes. It's like, okay, one step, and then the... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** What does it mean to be a first-generation immigrant? What is that? Break that down for me? |
**Alex Gallego:** You know, there is no backup. There is no other place to go. My mom didn't obviously have the means to convert Colombian pesos into US dollars and support me if I fail. And to me, for my context, it means "I have to figure this out. There is no alternative. I either figure this out, or I'm on the stre... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Was that like a daily reminder to you, or was this sort of like an undercurrent to your life? How did that manifest daily to your hunger? |
**Alex Gallego:** I think later in life I probably should have more backup plans... But largely, for the majority of my life, I had this one thing that I kind of became obsessed with, and I don't really have an alternative; in my mind, where I sit today, Redpanda, the product, will be successful, and if the product is ... |
At this point in my life, even if it's not the financial success, the obsession is like to me I see an opportunity for changing how actually developers build applications. And for better or worse, I don't know, I don't have any backup. There's nothing else. And maybe for the bigger parts of my life that's how I operate... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, I'm not a first-generation immigrant, but I can similarize my story to yours, because I didn't have a backup either in my journey. I grew up poor, my dad died when I was young... So a similar -- single mom kind of thing, a lot of similarities in our story, except that I'm not an immigrant firs... |
**Alex Gallego:** Yeah. And I wonder if you found -- I guess where you were growing up, maybe there's like subcultures, I think, in the US. For me, it was skateboarding and punk rock. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I skateboarded. I was a straight edge when I was in high school, you know? |
**Alex Gallego:** Oh my God, that's amazing. Listening to probably like Minor Threat, and some of the other \[unintelligible 00:21:37.13\] |
**Adam Stacoviak:** NOFX... |
**Alex Gallego:** Yeah, exactly. That's amazing. I wasn't in the straight edge, but I did go to a \[unintelligible 00:21:45.16\] punk rock, and... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I don't know if I was really straight edge, but I said I was. I mean, I was on a journey to grow up, I was an adolescent, so I was anything I needed to be, I suppose... But I was straight edge, I skated, I had Etnies, I had duct tape on my shoes, because I skated... My shoes were torn up, I had long... |
**Alex Gallego:** \[22:06\] Yeah. Well, the culture that this provides is sort of this -- there's like this sense of independence, I think, in that subculture, that was really powerful for me, at least when I was a teenager, just trying to attach myself to something... I was like "Well, whatever. These people may not b... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Struggles, yeah. Exactly. That's the thing with humanity - while you may have a different background and a different journey, and I have a different background and a different journey, we have very similar struggles, despite being so different in our backgrounds and upbringings. That's the beauty of... |
**Alex Gallego:** We have people in 22 countries right now, and the fascinating thing to me is -- and this thing sounds truthy, but it's a different thing to live it and experience it, which is, you know, most people just roughly want kind of the same thing. They just want to be successful, they want their kids to be f... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** How simple is that, right? |
**Alex Gallego:** Honestly, the basics. And to me -- like, they sound true to you in abstract, but when you actually get to experience it, it's like "Wow, it actually is exactly like you would expect people." You know, there's a bunch of good humans, and the struggles are very similar across the board. |
**Break:** \[23:40\] |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Let's dig deep into Redpanda. I want to dig into the actual tech, the inception of it... I'll describe some of the, I guess, overarching, and we can sort of poke holes in the story as necessary. So you were a fan of Kafka, you were inspired by that team, but yet you compete in terms of obviously min... |
**Alex Gallego:** Yeah. So when I was operationalizing a bunch of the Kafka clusters - and I had been a user for basically since like ZooKeeper 3.2, and the first Kafka release is 0.7, or 0.8, or something like that, a long, long time ago... And so I've always been a fan of the programming abstraction that it gave deve... |
Now, there were multiple sort of deep technical approaches that changed the way streaming works. To give credit to Pulsar, what Pulsar did - the background of Pulsar is that they came from Yahoo, and so it was all about this disaggregation of compute and store, because that's how Google published the papers, is like "T... |
\[27:58\] And so Pulsar - and I want to relate it to Kafka in a second - they really pushed the disaggregation of compute and storage. They're like "Hey, storage is S3." And I was like "Ooh, that's a really good idea." And then Kafka, in my mind what they did is that they built this massive ecosystem. And so for Kafka,... |
And so to go a little deeper, when I started Redpanda, I said, "Hey, how do we evolve this idea of streaming?" You know, I'd been working in streaming for a really long time... So when I went to storage, I said, "What Kafka has done well is the API." And mostly it's about the ecosystem that it brings with it. And what ... |
So Redpanda - I'm going to build a new storage engine from scratch, and the summary of that is that sometimes you get to reinvent the wheel when the road changes. And if I were to start from scratch, what would be like the three primitives? Keeping in mind that I wanted to use those two ideas of disaggregation of compu... |
And so the three tenets were you had to be super-fast, because people are not going to move if you're 1x, or 2x, or 3x. You have to be 3x, with published benchmarks where it shows like 70x with 50% of the hardware at a gigabyte per second. |
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