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Two, it had to be the best developer experience. And the way I envisioned that as an engineer is "Okay, if I wanna deploy this system, the simplest thing I could do is I can put everything in a single file", and then you put that one file on 1, 2, 3 computers, and you're done. That's the deployment model. And then the ... |
So that was sort of the napkin sketch when I started Redpanda. And I really need to acknowledge the work that the entire Kafka community has done, which is the reason why we don't have any clients. I actually think that the ecosystem needs to thrive on the Kafka community. I honestly see Redpanda the company being a go... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** This is an interesting space to be in. I mean, obviously, data is the new oil, and translating it, moving it at the speed of whatever it needs to be is paramount. What are some of the clients, the users of Redpanda? What are they doing? What are some of the actual use cases in the real world? How do... |
**Alex Gallego:** Yeah, StoneX is a really good example. They are a Fortune 100 company. They basically do their hedge trading through Redpanda; they did a YouTube on it too, so people can look it up after the podcast... But what's cool about it is because the average latency is four milliseconds, but it's predictable.... |
\[32:13\] Two, Lacework is an interesting one. So they do security events, like detection, and any sort of triggers alerts, and they do -- it's a very sophisticated company. And so they run at 14 gigabytes per second writes on top of Redpanda. We have others that kind of push the envelope... So that's more - I would ca... |
Some new things that Redpanda is enabling, that can only be done because of the latency improvements, are things like space explorations, or electric cars; we have one of the largest electric car companies in the world using us internally. We power a few space exploration, where people actually ship the satellite to ou... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Wow. |
**Alex Gallego:** Oil and gas pipelines jitter. So if the physical pipes wiggle a little bit too much - which sounds absurd when you first hear about it - it goes boom in physical space, and you really don't want that. And so what's been fascinating is like the classic as well will do, but the new things that we enable... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** And it's because of latency, really. Like, if you can get faster and more real time, or you can do predictable four-millisecond latency, like you said, and you put all the effort in the engineering to sort of make that a norm, versus not a norm, then you can probably do a lot more things. |
And as you're talking about this, and I'm reading more through the notes here, I was looking at just the fact that NVMe's were not a thing a decade ago. And you'd mentioned the beginning of this was like 2019, roughly, right? January, sometime in 2019, I think... So NVMe's were up and coming, I would say; not so much -... |
**Alex Gallego:** Totally. That is like a fundamental rearchitecture of how we approach the problem. As a programmer, honestly, when you start a project, you have a few -- just like not that many variables. Like, what's your memory model? What's your threading model? What's your concurrency model, which is related to t... |
\[35:49\] And so we started with a fundamentally new threading model called a thread per core architecture, where every thread looks like an independent computer, more or less. FoundationDB actually observed similar things a long time ago; they sold the database to Apple. So this idea of a thread per core really allows... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Oh, is that right? Particularly, yeah, you have access to more advanced NVMe's than I do then... So I was thinking 7,000 megabits per second, but that's certainly a lot more. |
**Alex Gallego:** Yeah. And by the way, the latency is amazing... Which is why when we went to market I said "You no longer have to choose between speed and data safety." You could get both. All you have to do is like reconstruct the software in a way that actually can take advantage of what the platform is. And so a b... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Interesting. Yeah. Wow, that's interesting. You really look at the whole entire model differently. Since your disks are so fast, there's almost zero latency, and your CPU is essentially probably bored if you're not pushing it far enough, to rearchitect to really take advantage of, as you said, 200+ ... |
**Alex Gallego:** Yeah. And what that allows us to do, which we're super-excited to share, is this idea of "Well, what else could you do?" In terms of even the -- in plain terms, with two partitions, in the Kafka parlance... So for those that are new and listening to this podcast, Redpanda adopts the Kafka model, where... |
And so now, what we could do - and most people don't run this, right? Most people have like 10,000, 5,000, 2,000 partitions in a particular cluster. They're like a mental model for data replication. But what this allows us to do is it's giving us the freedom to explore different computational models. It's like "How do ... |
And other things, like pushing data into a tiered storage, in a different format, that is not just row-oriented, but columnar-oriented, with things like Apache Iceberg, and so on. So having this rethinking allows us to just play around with more ideas to continue to lower the barrier for people to try streaming. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. How does cloud play into this? This is one of the misses you said that you kind of had, and I think -- where are you at today with cloud, and how did you miss? |
**Alex Gallego:** Yeah, so I wish I had launched the cloud earlier. It's like a big lesson learned for me. I wish I had partnered with a talent organization earlier, to kind of recruit for cloud faster. When we went to market, the context for that is we went from zero to the largest known Kafka workloads literally in t... |
\[39:57\] We had a social media company in Europe, where they were pushing a gig per second on the Kafka cluster, and they moved to us and they're like "Oh, hey, can we push 10x?" And so they went to 10 gigabytes per second. I was "Ooh..." Literally it's like the first year of selling the product. |
And so we made the decision like "Well, we are a data store, and we can never lose data, and so if I had to make a decision, I'm going to make a decision to do right, and I will fix all the bugs. You paid us money, and I feel like part of my integrity is on the line, so I will do right and fix it." And so when push cam... |
An alternative, by the way, which - this is like the debate, and I actually do think it's a miss in terms of adoption... I could have just said, "Hey, maybe this is all just cloud-only to get started, and once we hit this particular scale, then we offer it in a different self-hosted market." So that was amazing. I thin... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** You know, we can always say woulda, coulda, shoulda, right? I mean, we look back, and I can appreciate you saying that's a miss, and even being vulnerable and sharing that... The right answer sometimes when you have A or B is "Why not both?" But realistically -- you can say that in retrospect, with ... |
**Alex Gallego:** Yeah, but I think you have to pick your battles, and I guess I struggle with that a little bit. In my head I was like "Well, why not both?" |
**Adam Stacoviak:** But you seem like you hold yourself to a high standard, so that makes sense. |
**Alex Gallego:** Yeah. You know, strategically, one of the best things that cloud has allowed us to do and explore is this idea of data sovereignty, which is this totally new idea for cloud products, that in my experience only started to become popular really in the last six months. And with cloud -- okay, so part of ... |
And so on the second version that we just launched, what it allows us to do is this idea of "Bring your own cloud." Still fully managed. But the hard drives, the data that Redpanda writes - those hard drives belong in the users of VPC, but the control plane is in our VPC. Now, from a user, it's still a fully-managed Sa... |
I think that privacy is easier to achieve the data sovereignty, where for some industries like insurance, or marketing, where if they add a new vendor, they have to send an email to like 10,000 customers. They're "Hey, we're adding a new vendor. These are the risks" etc. And so we de-risk all of that, because they get ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[44:01\] Yeah. Does Redpanda live in GCP? How do you obtain, I guess, the lack of latency between clouds if the control plane is wherever you host it, and I've got my NVMe's in a separate space. How does that play out? |
**Alex Gallego:** Great question. So Redpanda, remember, is a single C++ binary. So that C++ binary lives inside your VPC. But in addition to Redpanda, we launched like a small proxy agent, and the proxy agent is the thing that gets commands from the control plane. So you can actually think of it as a command database.... |
I want to highlight a couple of things though... I think this would have been much more difficult even five years ago. The reason this is possible today is Amazon APIs are great. Same thing with Google Cloud APIs. So there are new APIs that were invented. Kubernetes gives us a single execution plane, so that it looks t... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Why is this sovereignty important? I mean, there's an obvious answer there, but what's the big picture of why sovereignty is important? |
**Alex Gallego:** There's a recent trend for special government, and things like that. An example is in Germany GCP talked about this in public. Amazon talks about this in public. Nation states are telling all of the hyper clouds that they want the services, but the clouds have to stay local, in that particular -- like... |
**Break:** \[47:56\] |
**Adam Stacoviak:** When it comes to, I guess, the hardware of the cloud that you built, did you build on top of GCP, or AWS? Or did you go bare metal? What's some of the infrastructure choices you had to make to make this state-of-the-art future possible? |
**Alex Gallego:** Yeah, so our control plane runs on both AWS and GCP. So if you launch a GCP thing, then it basically will work - like, the data plane will live in GCP, and then it'll make a TCP connection back to the data plane. The things where we innovated a lot were in this idea of WebPack Federation, which is how... |
But on the data plane side, that's where we invested a bunch of effort. An example is for Amazon we ship an ARM-optimized build for their particular processors. So you get 30% better bang for the buck. It's typically related to latency and throughput, and more predictable latency. So ARM - so we did that, too. We built... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** It's a lot of work. That's a lot of investment to -- I guess it's necessary though, right? Whatever is necessary to get the job done, that's what you've got to do. |
**Alex Gallego:** Somebody has to own the complexity. It's gonna be either us, or it's going to be you. And I feel like we're \[unintelligible 00:53:17.05\] so we should probably onboard that complexity. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, for sure. I guess where to next? What's the state of cloud now? So is it available, is it GA? How long has it been out? |
**Alex Gallego:** Yeah, so it was launched on November last year. It's SOC2-compliant, it has VPC peering, managed connectors... The things that people would expect. For me in particular, where I'm trying to push the company direction is into this idea -- so for context, we built Redpanda with this technology called sh... |
\[54:09\] And so streaming - you always are appending. It means you always are writing to the -- it's like an insert-only table, you can think of as streaming. And so at some point - well, you have to remove the tail of the log, or the head of the log, to make space for new data, because you're going to run out of phys... |
And so for us, it's leaning into more open formats. What if the data that lands on S3 - what if all of your event data is somehow type-checked so that when you insert into this particular topic, the data format, it's correct? Like, it's either protobuf, or it's avro, or it has the right columns, or whatever it is. And ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Are you pioneering this open format then? |
**Alex Gallego:** So we're going to leverage what all of the datalakes, data warehousing category of companies are using, which is going to be Apache Iceberg. So we're going to leverage that, but as far as I'm concerned, we are the only company in the streaming world that the uniform format is going to be a columnar pr... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I mentioned earlier in the call about this tension between you and Kafka... And Kafka is obviously open source. I'm just curious why you chose the BSL license. How did this play a role in the economics and the business model of Redpanda? Considering your inspiration of, and probably - I'm sure you l... |
**Alex Gallego:** It's how we grow up, basically. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. How did you explore, I suppose, the commercial viability of Redpanda juxtaposed against the possibility of open source? Why BSL, why eventually open source? |
**Alex Gallego:** So for those new in licensing, BSL turns into Apache 2 on a rolling four-year window. It means the code today, in four years from today, is going to be Apache 2. And so that's one. The second clause that is interesting is that for us, frankly, we didn't want the hybrid clouds and the most dominant clo... |
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