Deepthi Sigireddi, PlanetScale and Vitess | KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA 2022

This is Textron TV. Hey everyone. We're back here live in Detroit at kubecon.

You probably can't hear it because I think our mics are pretty good. But it's actually pretty loud out there. There's a some sort of monorail that goes by sounds like a race car.

There's a lot of noise there's music but hopefully you're hearing us. It's a great coupon. I'm happy to be joined by Deep Sea cigaretti.

Yes, and for those of you who follow us all the time both of you and hi to my wife. 50 actually joined us at the last cubecon was Valencia right in Valencia. We'll be back in Europe.

I should mention for Amsterdam in April, but we're here now in Detroit deeply welcome. Welcome back. Thank you.

I'm glad to be here. I'm glad to have you here. We should mention you kind of hearing two hats.

Yes, right. I'm gonna let you explain tell them a little bit about you background and what you doing, right? So I work on with us, which is a cncf graduated project as the lead maintainer.

I've been working on with us for about four years now, which is also the amount of time. I've been a software engineer at Planet scale where I now lead the witness engineering team. We have an open source team at Planet scale.

Wittest was built at YouTube to solve their my sequel scaling problem, but it has evolved beyond the original solution to become a much more general purpose distributed database. And today we announced version 15 of wittest General availability, which actually makes it easier for people trying to use witness to deploy and operate it. Excellent.

I want to talk about that. But before we do for those of us out here who maybe aren't familiar with the the cncf You know a circle of life sandbox incubation eventually graduation, and there's only a handful. of projects, which have graduated in order to graduate a project needs to have sort of a critical mass of code contributors of downloads and users and installs, you know, the community has to be kind of self-sustaining if you will give us an idea of how big the project is, right, so Witness has definitely upwards of 30 active deployments.

We don't know the exact number because people don't always tell us that they are running it in production. in terms of contributors for the last two full calendar years 2020 and 2021 we had over 400 contributors. More than 200 of them contributed code others contributed issues and documentation and things like that.

Over 60 companies were represented in that Community. We have a close to 3,000 people now in our slack Community where people can ask questions and get them answered. It's a it's it's a pretty large install base already.

So new version 15 is the new version B15. What what's new in v15? So v15 makes it easier to operate with us in the sense that previously if my sequel database that witness was managing went down it often required either a third party integration or manual intervention to repair that whereas now with us has a component called VTR which monitors the status of all of the My sequels that Witnesses managing and automatically does the necessary repair.

So that's one part of it. The other part of it is that we have built a new web UI to let people monitor their witness clusters and this web UI is built on a modern UI stack versus the very old UI which we used to have and it also allows people to monitor multip. All bitters deployments.

So maybe you have a development environment and a production environment. You can see both of them from the same UI. That's right.

Yeah, let's let's switch hats. Tell them about your other role. Okay, so a planet scale I started as a software engineer working on the database as a service solution and then I sort of moved over to the open source side of things.

We have a reasonably large open source engineering team at Planet scale and I'm the tech lead for that as well. We contribute primarily to witness even though occasionally Planet scale Engineers will find things that need fixing in other open source, projects and contribute that as well. We also build and maintain a kubernetes operator for Witness.

So in addition to all of this, I am involved in the day-to-day operations of the planet scale database service itself because things can go wrong and the people who know with us. Are the experts on running with us and need to get involved? So for instance maybe on my sequel database that we are running in Planet scale behind Witness Goes Down And requires manual repair.

So there's a set of people who know how to do that. And I'm one of those people So, you know we jumped right into the role of Planet scale. How would you describe planet scale?

the audience Planet scale is a serverless database which makes it very very easy to provision a database and start using it for any applications. So if you're a startup and you just need a database to store your data. Create an account a few clicks maybe in 30 seconds.

You have a working database. You have a connection string. Everything is secure by default.

Everything is encrypted at rest. People. Do not have access to user data.

If someone wants to leave the service they can take their data with us. So Planet scale is a database service that gives you all of these guarantees secure by default extremely easy to use. It's meant for developers who just want to get started quickly at the same time.

If you're an Enterprise then Planet scale takes the takes over the operational burden of running your at scale database cluster and you're getting scalability out of the box with witness. So that's not an afterthought. Love it.

All right. you know, it's interesting and it's it's a theme that I think we're gonna see throughout the rest of the week here is The whole kind of business model that we see in the cloud native world is It's Not Unusual to have a company like Planet scale that you know, it's foundational underpinnings has an open source product project like this that they're building on top of offering a better mouse trap a better experience. For end users.

Of course, I would imagine you're in a very funny place because here you are is the maintainer for this project. You want Venice to be the best project it could be. But you know that there are things that planet scale.

has to do the viable Right. Why if this is that great? Why use Planet scale kind of thing?

How do you how do you separate that? How do you decide now? This is something for Planet scale.

so I think companies like Planet scale which are stewards of Open Source projects. There is a mix of altruism and self-interest. so just in a principle way companies do decide that they are going to put features upstream and not hide them.

So the community benefits but there has to be something more that the company can offer beyond the features that the project gives you and I think the way Planet scale has done. This is that there are things that planet scale is able to do that. We can't possibly do as part of wittest because it requires owning the infrastructure.

It requires having access to the to historical statistics not just real-time statistics and witness as a project doesn't have those whereas at Planet scale you can take what comes out of witness and build a pipeline to store that data and then provide something like very insights which is a planet scale product which looks at the history of the queries that have executed and tells tell Planet scale users which are the most expensive queries which need to be optimized. so there is that area of usability how provisioning not having to own the infrastructure that planet scale gives you that witness cannot so those things become quite easy to separate. Because there are things that the product that the project cannot take in as part of the project and have to be built around it.

Got it. We're almost out of time for people who want to dive in more maybe involved in visits. io.

There is a link forever. com, actually so nice to see you again. I'm glad you do a great job.

Every project should have a maintainer like ours like her we're gonna take a break here in Detroit. We'll be back in just a minute. Thanks so much.