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• Importance of open source and adoption in project success |
• Timeline and goals for Supabase's MVP and future development |
• Debate about using Go to write Postgres extensions and potential alternatives |
• Exploring options for linking to Cgo and translating AI for use in Vitess |
• Considering a new approach to development, potentially leaving Go and using C directly |
• Addressing technical challenges and trade-offs, including flexibility and approachability |
• Building a new team for the Multigres project, including hiring high-caliber engineers and contributors |
• Planning for implementation and deployment of Multigres, including a Kubernetes operator and potential use in Supabase |
• Discussing the importance of testing and validation, particularly at scale, in order to ensure that the system works as intended. |
• Implementing a rigorous testing policy to ensure code reliability and confidence in the product |
• Considering porting or copying test suites from Vitess to speed up development |
• Determining the licensing for the project, with a plan to use Apache |
• Debating whether to create a new project or fork Vitess, with a goal of allowing the project to evolve independently |
• Addressing the need for high availability and consensus in database systems, and the importance of storage being integrated with the database |
• Planning to cover high availability and consensus in upcoming blog posts |
• Supabase's need for a scalable solution for Postgres |
• The limitations of existing solutions like Neon and Aurora |
• Sugu Sougoumarane's goal of creating a sharded solution for Postgres |
• The absence of a solution like Vitess for Postgres |
• Sugu's decision to come out of retirement to work on Multigres |
• The potential impact on Postgres and the Postgres community |
**Jerod Santo:** Today we're joined by Sugu Sougoumarane, co-creator of Vitess, co-founder of PlanetScale, and now the head of Multigres at Supabase. Sugu, we are excited to have you here. |
**Sugu Sougoumarane:** I'm very excited to be here, too. |
**Jerod Santo:** I'm excited to see you back at work... You've been off work. You said -- you just told me you took a three-year sabbatical? Is that accurate? Is that true? |
**Sugu Sougoumarane:** Yeah, yeah. I even wondered if I was going to come back, until, you know, I started feeling the itch... And yeah, that's what brought me back in. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Were you gardening? You know, ripe tomatoes... What kind of vegetables did you start growing? |
**Sugu Sougoumarane:** \[laughs\] I actually went on a self-reinvention of some sort. I kind of did a full debug of myself of some sort. |
**Jerod Santo:** Did you climb a tall mountain, or how did you do that? |
**Sugu Sougoumarane:** Oh, no, just sit at home, think, walks... And a lot of thinking. And I even got into doing some voluntary work, because I realized as a human -- basically, I thought I should be more human, and that led me into a bunch of voluntary work, which I actually started to do. And I even thought of going... |
**Jerod Santo:** Did it take -- how long did it take before you started getting that itch? Because three years is a pretty long one. I think by that point I might be detached enough to not get the itch again. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I agree. |
**Sugu Sougoumarane:** It was strange... I think last year, sometime late last year. So for about six to eight months I've been feeling the itch. I think it started because I'm still in touch with friends, and stuff. They used to ask me for questions and help about things... And then as you answer, you kind of enjoy th... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. |
**Sugu Sougoumarane:** And they say "Oh, what do people desperately need?" |
**Jerod Santo:** Databases still matter, it turns out. |
**Sugu Sougoumarane:** Databases matter, infrastructure matters... Nothing much has changed in that area. So I came back and slowly got back into things. |
**Jerod Santo:** What pushed you away in the first place? Why did you go on that sabbatical? Had you accomplished all your goals? Were you burning out? What was the situation that made you \[unintelligible 00:07:08.26\] |
**Sugu Sougoumarane:** Both of those, actually. |
**Jerod Santo:** Both. Okay. |
**Sugu Sougoumarane:** So this was 2022... I had been working on Vitess for 12 years straight. We started Vitess in 2010 at YouTube, and... Vitess is an enormous project. And for a while, I was the sole maintainer of Vitess. And it was -- it's a pretty big load on your brain. And after I founded PlanetScale, hired a te... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[08:07\] What year was that again? Was it around the time that you -- I'm not familiar with the story behind the scenes really with Sam Lambert, but I guess I'm tangential friends by having him on the show, and hearing his backstory, and PlanetScale's early story, and mainly taking over the CEO rol... |
**Sugu Sougoumarane:** So I think my memory may be hazy here... I think he came on board around 2020. Sam has been a fan of PlanetScale from the beginning. He even did a Sequoia Scout investment when we launched. And so he has been following us, he's been actually advising us also in the early couple of years... And th... |
The first feature he launched was the schema branching and merging, which the dev community completely loved. And that was around '22. Jiten at the time was CEO, and Sam talked... And they came to an agreement that if Sam became the CEO, that would be really effective, because then he could control the whole story. He ... |
**Jerod Santo:** Well, that's a good feeling. I mean, you've done a lot of things you set out to do. For those of us playing catch up, can you describe Vitess, what it is and how it helps scale databases? |
**Sugu Sougoumarane:** Yeah. Yeah, definitely. Vitess, actually -- when we started Vitess, we thought it was a six-month project. \[laughs\] So YouTube was actually in deep trouble scalability-wise. There were more than a handful of outages every day. Sometimes 10, 12 outages per day, and they were all caused by the da... |
\[12:01\] And we wrote code for about a year, actually. It took us about a year to launch the first version. And the first version that we launched was just a connection pooler, which was actually the biggest problem we were having with MySQL at that time. And that immediately gave some breathing room for YouTube. And ... |
And once this got launched, people started noticing that this so-called connection pooler is intelligent, and it can do other things beyond just taking care of connections... Like for example fielding bad queries, or watching queries and killing them if they run for too long. And so we slowly started adding those featu... |
And that eventually evolved into -- then we added sharding solutions to it, like how do you re-shard... And then we added one more layer, which is the routing layer... And then we realized "Oh my God, this is now almost a fully distributed database. Why don't we make it a fully distributed database?" Which was the fina... |
By the time -- we started in 2010. I think what we call as the v3 was around 2014 or so. About four years later, Vitess could be adopted by anyone outside of YouTube. And then the rest is history. |
**Jerod Santo:** The rest is history. Open source, mass adoption, PlanetScale, built a business around it... It's a very successful business to this day... Really cool stuff. Kind of an open source success story. I was gonna say "prototypical", or "stereotypical", but not necessarily. But just a good one. Just a good o... |
**Sugu Sougoumarane:** \[laughs\] |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. To extend from what you're saying there, Jerod, I think it's wild... Sugu, one thing you mentioned was the nine month or six month you thought that the project would take in terms of like its doneness... But then it turned into a company, and then obviously, PlanetScale has been able to -- and... |
**Sugu Sougoumarane:** Yeah, yeah. The first adopter was actually a company called Flipkart. I believe they still use the older version of Vitess... Then HubSpot came on board. They still use Vitess, and they have their own operator. They were among the first ones to launch Vitess in Kubernetes. And then later Slack ca... |
**Jerod Santo:** \[16:07\] Well, you said once and for all, and I said once and for all, but the technical facts about Vitess is it's not for all, right? It's for all who are running specific database systems. And one of those alls who aren't part of the all is the Postgres ecosystem... Which has been awesome for many ... |
**Sugu Sougoumarane:** Yeah, yeah. I think the Postgres community took note of Vitess a long time ago, as far back as 2018, was the first conversation I had with someone from the Postgres side and they said "Hey, we need something like Vitess for Postgres." And there have been a few false starts on this project. I thin... |
But you know, 2020, PlanetScale was on the rise... It was just too busy, and unfortunately, I had to make a call, that I have this company to take care of, I have this company to build... I can't afford this distraction at this time. I actually kind of had to back out, saying that I don't think I can do this at this ti... |
**Jerod Santo:** I think mimicry, or ports, or whatever you want to call it, is kind of a tried and true part of the open source culture. You know, take this good idea from this ecosystem which I appreciate, but I'm not day to day user of, and bring it to my piece of the world, and reimplement it over here, or steal th... |
**Sugu Sougoumarane:** I don't get this -- yeah, I don't know why I had to come and start this... \[laughs\] |
**Jerod Santo:** Is it that hard? Because usually, you look at something and you think, "It can't be that hard. I'll do it over here." Is it that hard of a technical problem? Or is MySQL and Postgres implementation-wise so dramatically different that even the concepts don't necessarily come across? What's that chasm lo... |
**Sugu Sougoumarane:** I think it is more of the first problem. The fact is sharding, if you go and ask in a university, they'll say sharding is one of the oldest concepts in databases. It's over 30 years old. But the issue with sharding is that nobody ever worked on it, nobody ever developed it into something practica... |
\[20:22\] Which is actually strenuously hard. For me to make the leap from an application sharded system to a system where the application does not care about sharding, and generically implement it in a database, it took me about -- I literally sat and thought for three months straight, nothing other than just pure thi... |
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