Yugabyte: Where Data Lives Forever!
From building Geo-Distributed-Engineering-Teams to helping build Geo-Distributed-Cloud-Native-Apps!
In this post, I'd like to share insights based on my experience leading Enterprise Data Engineering at a Fortune 200 Retail, Supply Chain, Manufacturing, and Chemicals company; how I landed at Yugabyte; and why I believe in YugabyteDB?
— — — — — The Past — — — — —
I started my career by building data models on Oracle databases — back when relational data models were trendy, everyone learned and built databases using EF Codd's Relational DBMS principles.
I have done similar work on Oracle eBusiness Suite ERP using the upper half of the database engine with the oracle store procedure language PL/SQL for Oracle Process Manufacturing modules (OPM and APM).
SQL: Structured query language — Oracle was the first company to bring it to a fully commercialized offering.
PL/SQL is a highly portable platform, a fully procedural language with embedded support for SQL within it. Today, that same SQL and relational data models have extreme holding power.
Oracle databases ran on over 50 different platforms — a combination of OS and processors — this was before Java (before Oracle acquired Sun MicroSystems). Today, we take both Java & GO for granted.
The idea that a tabular way of organizing data is compelling is the premise for Oracle's exponential rise. Still, today — that idea holds a lot of strength. Hence, the need for RDBMS-based distributed databases.
What has changed since then? Back then, the datasets and applications were not too large — a lot or all of the datasets fit in a single node; Hence, the design points revolved around building systems for a single node-based architecture, which led to the Monolithic Application design. For many enterprises, such architecture still serves them well where volume is not of concern — which has been a consistent insight from my consulting work in the data middleware space while I was with Hitachi Consulting.
From there, I joined an Enterprise Data middleware team @ Sherwin-Williams.
Building Geo-distributed-Engineering-teams
My primary responsibility when I left Sherwin-Williams was to provide data-as-a-service that is easy to consume, secure, and elastic for our users globally.
Sherwin is the largest paint manufacturing company globally with operations in 110 countries and has about 6000 retail stores just in North America. Out of 70k odd employees, I've had the privilege to support 28,000+ of them on various infra-structure stacks that consume data from my former team. We ingested data from over a dozen different ERP systems (Oracle EBS primarily) and multi-POS systems as our sources for driving value and innovation.
Global Leader:
I gained my data experience through many assignments in LATAM (Mexico, Chile, Peru, Brazil, Argentina, Ecuador), EMEA (primarily UK), and APAC & ANZ (Malaysia, India, Australia, and New Zealand).
In all these regions, post-M&A, we built and managed a data middleware layer for our corporate data centers (in today's terminology — built 1000s of data pipelines) from many system-of-record applications like ERPs, CRMs, MDMs, POS systems, and IoT devices. We built and managed each region's Data Engineering needs with local data engineers.
After working for over a decade at an Enterprise company as a customer and as an early adopter of many SaaS and IPaaS products, my desire was to next work for a tech company. I wanted a chance to help develop data products that are innovative & improve the quality of engineers' lives by meeting their un-met & un-articulated needs.
My Heart has always been with databases!
— — — — — The Present — — — — —
I have followed YugabyteDB for about a year. After listening to Co-founder Karthik on a podcast w. Josh Long from VMWare, I wanted to see if I could be part of the team.
The cause:
With the help of a few mutual introductions, I got connected to a couple of leaders at the company. One thing led to another and with great excitement, I joined Yugabyte 3 months ago in the Field Engineering department and am currently promoted to serve as the Director of Sales Engineering for our Enterprise Customers in North America (Central/Mid-west regions), working as the GTM partner with Sales, Product and Engineering teams.
I wanted to work for a database company with a clearly defined mission/purpose that upholds the highest ethical standard. I believe, Yugabyte checked all the boxes & I am a big believer in its products and services!
I will explain below…
Building Geo-Distributed-Cloud-Native-Apps w. YugabyteDB!
The positive side to the pandemic is that it has undoubtedly raised confidence & overall aspirations. Some organizations are moving towards DIGITAL at a rapid velocity — systemic change is happening quite quickly. The most significant difference is how the C-suite is personally championing the transition.
In one quarter, 3 yrs' worth of change happened in many enterprises, which I've personally witnessed at Sherwin. Ivy Chin, our most recently Chief Digital and Technology Officer, has made strides of progress in championing such change within the 156-year-old enterprise. Overnight we could achieve something that would have taken us months.
Every enterprise in the US is undergoing two corporate-level initiatives —
- Enterprise Data Strategy: Using Analytics, AI & ML — lots of great work is being done in the AutoAI & AutoML space. OLAP databases serve this space. The success we've seen as an industry with Snowflake Data Cloud is a testament to the mass adoption of cloud-native databases in analytics.
- Digital Transformation: Enterprises are becoming more flexible, less hierarchical, faster, and more sustainable. Companies are making a lighting fast pivot to DIGITAL with this pandemic out of necessity.
Digital is top on the agenda; it's higher in priority than Data Strategy!!!!
To provide Enterprise-wide Digital enablement with Zero-Disruption-Modernization requires a new generation of OLTP databases — and this is where YugabyteDB comes in!
as OLTP side is a lot more difficult than OLAP !
I can’t agree more with what our CEO said —
“As organizations embrace digital transformation and endeavor to become more data-driven, the need for a cloud-native database that can scale with them is emminent” — Bill Cook, CEO, Yugabyte.
— — — — — The Future — — — — —
Insights:
A consistent theme across every enterprise in the Mid-west we are noticing —
- Cloud is a Must, and Hybrid is Inevitable!
I don't know where I heard it, but it couldn't be truer and it certainly has a ring to it.
2. Connecting over Collecting!
Instead of spending engineering efforts for bringing and centralizing data for application-development federated models are being given great thought. Topics pertaining to a Mesh or a Fabric architecture are in the forefront — with the goal of bringing data closer to the business/the end-user are becoming mainstream.
3. Distributed SQL will become increasingly critical!
Globally distributed SQL databases are needed for supporting such federated models for solving scalability limitations, with built-in resiliency and disaster recovery.
4. Enterprises are demanding agility for bringing new features to market QUICKLY! Agility rarely comes from hyper-focusing on how your competition. It comes from obsessing on your customers’ experience and your employees’ engagement. One way to get there is via using the unrestraint power of the cloud and by improving developers’ productivity.
Which I see at great length at Yugabyte — where developer experience is given great importance, join our slack channel you can see that for yourself!
5. The future is DB-as-a-Service and will be in the Cloud.
The future is Database-as-a-Service
and will be in the Cloud !!!
I felt like I needed to say that twice. Here’s why —
> DBs will increasingly be consumed as a managed service. Automation-first, zero manual touches, have developers focus on business problems.
> Security and compliance will continue to be critical — DevSecOps best practices are all foundational to meeting compliance and customer security requirements.
Why Yugabyte?
Reasons below —
- Almost fully Postgres compatible — Based on the 2020 StackOverflow survey, Postgres is the most beloved database of choice, and Yugabyte is fully Postgres compatible with many added features and provides features that Postgres lacks.
2. Fast growing and popular —
3. Rapidly climbing the rankings ladder fast for an 8-year-old transactional database company among the 350 databases that exist.
4. Massive Target market:
From the recent 2022 AWS Summit to note — their highest growth service within AWS is Aurora DB with 10x growth since 2017 YoY.
Aurora with its limitations with geo-distribution and multi-region capabilities, is still the fastest growing service with AWS. YugabyteDB has answers for horizontal write scalability, and is any-cloud, multi-cloud compatible.
As per IDC, this is a massive market.
5. It is Open Source with a thriving developer community: the power of collaboration!
We would love for you to be a part of our journey by joining our open-source community!
If you have any questions, please join our community Slack channel.
We at Yugabyte are Demystifying Distributed SQL
We are leaning towards the direction where our enterprise customers are headed.
We’re continuing to empower and enable our developers to be the best versions of themselves that they can be. We see this as a key differentiator, enabling us to push the boundaries of digital products with the power of an open-source Distributed SQL database whilst enabling our developers to stay in lockstep with our customer needs.
So I challenge all of the builders, dreamers, and doers out there, to give YugabyteDB a chance today to enable tomorrow!
Also, I am hiring for America's field engineering team. If you have experience in Distributed SQL databases reach out!
Thank you for reading!
