INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
When the former CTOs of YouTube, Facebook and Dropbox seed fund a database startup, you know there’s something special going on under the
hood. Jiten Vaidya and Sugu Sougoumarane saved YouTube from a scalability nightmare by inventing and open-sourcing Vitess, a brilliant
relational data storage system
But in the decade since working there, the pair have been inundated with requests from tech companies desperate for help building the
operational scaffolding needed to actually integrate Vitess.So today the pair are revealing their new startup PlanetScale that makes it easy
to build multi-cloud databases that handle enormous amounts of information without locking customers into Amazon, Google or Microsoft’s
Battle-tested at YouTube, the technology could allow startups to fret less about their backend and focus more on their unique value
“Now they don’t have to reinvent the wheel” Vaidya tells me
“A lot of companies facing this scaling problem end up solving it badly in-house and now there’s a way to solve that problem by using us
to help.”PlanetScale quietly raised a $3 million seed round in April, led by SignalFire and joined by a who’s who of engineering
They include YouTube co-founder and CTO Steve Chen, Quora CEO and former Facebook CTO Adam D’Angelo, former Dropbox CTO Aditya Agarwal,
PayPal and Affirm co-founder Max Levchin, MuleSoft co-founder and CTO Ross Mason, Google director of engineering Parisa Tabriz and
Facebook’s first female engineer and South Park Commons founder Ruchi Sanghvi
If anyone could foresee the need for Vitess implementation services, it’s these leaders, who’ve dealt with scaling headaches at tech’s
top companies.But how can a scrappy startup challenge the tech juggernauts for cloud supremacy First, by actually working with them
The PlanetScale beta that’s now launching lets companies spin up Vitess clusters on its database-as-a-service, their own through a
licensing deal, or on AWS with Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure coming shortly
Once these integrations with the tech giants are established, PlanetScale clients can use it as an interface for a multi-cloud setup where
they could keep their data master copies on AWS US-West with replicas on Google Cloud in Ireland and elsewhere
That protects companies from becoming dependent on one provider and then getting stuck with price hikes or service problems.PlanetScale also
promises to uphold the principles that undergirded Vitess
“It’s our value that we will keep everything in the query pack completely open source so none of our customers ever have to worry about
lock-in” Vaidya says.PlanetScale co-founders (from left): Jiten Vaidya and Sugu SougoumaraneBattle-tested, YouTube-approvedHe
and Sougoumarane met 25 years ago while at Indian Institute of Technology Bombay
Back in 1993 they worked at pioneering database company Informix together before it flamed out
Sougoumarane was eventually hired by Elon Musk as an early engineer for X.com before it got acquired by PayPal, and then left for YouTube
Vaidya was working at Google and the pair were reunited when it bought YouTube and Sougoumarane pulled him on to the team.“YouTube was
growing really quickly and the relationship database they were using with MySQL was sort of falling apart at the seams,” Vaidya recalls
Adding more CPU and memory to the database infra wasn’t cutting it, so the team created Vitess
The horizontal scaling sharding middleware for MySQL let users segment their database to reduce memory usage while still being able to
YouTube has smoothly ridden that infrastructure to 1.8 billion users ever since.“Sugu and Mike Solomon invented and made Vitess open
source right from the beginning since 2010 because they knew the scaling problem wasn’t just for YouTube, and they’ll be at other
companies five or 10 years later trying to solve the same problem,” Vaidya explains
That proved true, and now top apps like Square and HubSpot run entirely on Vitess, with Slack now 30 percent onboard.Vaidya left YouTube in
2012 and became the lead engineer at Endorse, which got acquired by Dropbox, where he worked for four years
But in the meantime, the engineering community strayed toward MongoDB-style non-relational databases, which Vaidya considers inferior
He sees indexing issues and says that if the system hiccups during an operation, data can become inconsistent — a big problem for banking
“We think horizontally scaled relationship databases are more elegant and are something enterprises really need.Database legends
reuniteFed up with the engineering heresy, a year ago Vaidya committed to creating PlanetScale
It’s composed of four core offerings: professional training in Vitess, on-demand support for open-source Vitess users, Vitess
database-as-a-service on PlanetScale’s servers and software licensing for clients that want to run Vitess on premises or through other
It lets companies re-shard their databases on the fly to relocate user data to comply with regulations like GDPR, safely migrate from other
systems without major codebase changes, make on-demand changes and run on Kubernetes.The PlanetScale teamPlanetScale’s customers now
include Indonesian e-commerce giant Bukalapak, and it’s helping Booking.com, GitHub and New Relic migrate to open-source Vitess
Growth is suddenly ramping up due to inbound inquiries
Last month around when Square Cash became the No
1 app, its engineering team published a blog post extolling the virtues of Vitess
Now everyone’s seeking help with Vitess sharding, and PlanetScale is waiting with open arms
“Jiten and Sugu are legends and know firsthand what companies require to be successful in this booming data landscape,” says Ilya
Kirnos, founding partner and CTO of SignalFire.The big cloud providers are trying to adapt to the relational database trend, with Google’s
Cloud Spanner and Cloud SQL, and Amazon’s AWS SQL and AWS Aurora
Their huge networks and marketing war chests could pose a threat
But Vaidya insists that while it might be easy to get data into these systems, it can be a pain to get it out
PlanetScale is designed to give them freedom of optionality through its multi-cloud functionality so their eggs aren’t all in one
basket.Finding product market fit is tough enough
Trying to suddenly scale a popular app while also dealing with all the other challenges of growing a company can drive founders crazy
But if it’s good enough for YouTube, startups can trust PlanetScale to make databases one less thing they have to worry about.
