Transcript

Announcer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.

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Corey: This episode is sponsored by our friends at Fortinet. Fortinet’s partnership with AWS is a better-together combination that ensures your workloads on AWS are protected by best-in-class security solutions powered by comprehensive threat intelligence and more than 20 years of cybersecurity experience. Integrations with key AWS services simplify security management, ensure full visibility across environments, and provide broad protection across your workloads and applications. Visit them at AWS re:Inforce to see the latest trends in cybersecurity on July 25-26 at the Boston Convention Center. Just go over to the Fortinet booth and tell them Corey Quinn sent you and watch for the flinch. My thanks again to my friends at Fortinet.

Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I’m Corey Quinn. This promoted guest episode is brought to us by our friends at EDB. And not only do they bring us this promoted episode, they bring me their CTO for Cloud, Benjamin Anderson. Benjamin, thank you so much for agreeing to suffer the slings and arrows that I will no doubt throw at you in a professional context, because EDB is a database company, and I suck at those things.

Benjamin: [laugh]. Thanks, Corey. Nice to be here.

Corey: Of course. So, databases are an interesting and varied space. I think we can all agree—or agree to disagree—that the best database is, of course, Route 53, when you misuse TXT records as a database. Everything else is generally vying for number two. EDB was—back in the days that I was your customer—was EnterpriseDB, now rebranded as EDB, which is way faster to say, and I approve of that.

But you were always the escalation point of last resort. When you’re stuck with a really weird and interesting Postgres problem, EDB was where you went because if you folks couldn’t solve the problem, it was likely not going to get solved. I always contextualized you folks as a consulting shop. That’s not really what you do. You are the CTO for Cloud.

And, ah, interesting. Do databases behave differently in cloud environments? Well, they do when you host them as a managed service, which is an area you folks have somewhat recently branched into. How’d you get there?

Benjamin: Ah, that’s interesting. So, there’s a bunch of stuff to unpack there. I think EDB has been around for a long time. It’s something like 13, 14, 15 years, something like that, and really it's just been kind of slowly growing, right? We did start very much as a product company. We built some technology to help customers get from Oracle database on to Postgres, way back in 2007, 2008.

That business has just slowly been growing. It’s been going quite well. Frankly, I only joined about 18 months ago, and it’s really cool tech, right? We natively understand some things that Oracle is doing. Customers don’t have to change their schemas to migrate from Oracle to Postgres. There’s some cool technology in there.

But as you point out, I think a lot of our position in the market has not been that product focused. There’s been a lot of people seeing us as the Postgres experts, and as people who can solve Postgres problems, in general. We have, for a long time, employed a lot of really sharp Postgres people. We still employ a lot of really sharp Postgres people. That’s very much, in a lot of ways, our bread and butter. That we’re going to fix Postgres problems as they come up.

Now, over the past few years, we’ve definitely tried to shift quite a bit into being more of a product company. We’ve brought on a bunch of people who’ve been doing more enterprise software product type development over the past few years, and really focusing ourselves more and more on building products and investing in ourselves as a product company. We’re not a services company. We’re not a consulting company. We do, I think, provide the best Postgres support in the market. But it’s been a journey. The cloud has been a significant part of that as well, right? You can’t get away.

Corey: Oh, yeah. These days, when someone’s spinning up a new workload, it’s unlikely—in most cases—they’re going to wind up spinning up a new data center, if they don’t already have one. Yes, there’s still a whole bunch of on-prem workloads. But increasingly, the default has become cloud. Instead of, “Why cloud?” The question’s become, “Why not?”

Benjamin: Right, exactly. Then, as people are more and more accepting of managed services, you have to be a product company. You have to be building products in order to support your database customers because what they want his managed services. I was working in managed databases and service, something like, ten years ago, and it was like pulling teeth. This is after RDS launched. This was still pulling teeth trying to get people to think about, oh, I’m going to let you run my database. Whereas, now obviously, it’s just completely different. We have to build great products in order to succeed in the database business, in general.

Corey: One thing that jumped out at me when you first announced this was the URL is enterprisedb.com. That doesn’t exactly speak to, you know, non-large companies, and EDB is what you do. You have a very corporate logo, but your managed service is called BigAnimal, which I absolutely love. It actually expresses a sense of whimsy and personality that I can no doubt guess that a whole bunch of people argued against, but BigAnimal, it is. It won through. I love that. Was that as contentious as I’m painting it to be, or people actually have a sense of humor sometimes?

Benjamin: [laugh]. Both, it was extremely contentious. I, frankly, was one of the people who was not in favor of it at first. I was in favor of something that was whimsical, but maybe not quite that whimsical.

Corey: Well, I call it Postgres-squeal, so let’s be very clear here that we’re probably not going to see eye-to-eye on most anything in pronunciation things. But we can set those differences aside and have a conversation.

Benjamin: Absolutely, no consider that. It was deliberate, though, to try to step away a little bit from the blue-suit-and-tie, enterprise, DB-type branding. Obviously, a lot of our customers are big enterprises. We’re good at that. We’re not trying to be the hip, young startup targeting business in a lot of ways. We have a wide range of customers, but we want to branch out a little bit.

Corey: One of the challenges right now is if I spin up an environment inside of AWS, as one does, and I decide I certainly don’t want to take the traditional approach of running a database on top of an EC2 instance—the way that we did in the olden days—because RDS was crappy. Now that it’s slightly less crappy, that becomes a not ideal path. I start looking at their managed database offerings, and there are something like 15 distinct managed databases that they offer, and they never turn anything off. And they continue to launch things into the far future. And it really feels, on some level, like 20 years from now—what we call a DBA today—their primary role is going to look a lot more like helping a company figure out which of Amazon’s 40 managed databases is the appropriate fit for this given workload. Yet, when I look around at what the industry has done, it seems that when we’re talking about relational databases. Postgres has emerged back when I was, more or less, abusing servers in person in my data center days, it was always MySQL. These days, Postgres is the de facto standard, full stop. I admit that I was mostly keeping my aura away from any data that was irreplaceable at that time. What happened? What did I miss?

Benjamin: It’s a really good question. And I certainly am not a hundred percent on all the trends that went on there. I know there’s a lot of folks that are not happy about the MySQL acquisition by Oracle. I think there’s a lot of energy that was adopted by the NoSQL movement, as well. You have people who didn’t really care about transactional semantics that were using MySQL because they needed a place to store their data. And then, things like MongoDB and that type of system comes along where it’s significantly easier than MySQL, and that subset of the population just sort of drifts away from MySQL.

Corey: And in turn, those NoSQL projects eventually turn into something where, okay, now we’re trying to build a banking system on top of it, and it’s, you know, I guess you can use a torque wrench as a hammer if you’re really creative about it, but it seems like there’s a better approach.

Benjamin: Yeah, exactly. And those folks are coming back around to the relational databases, exactly. At the same time, the advancements in Postgres from the early eight series to today are significant, right? We shouldn’t underestimate how much Postgres has really moved forward. It wasn’t that long ago that replication was hardly a thing and Postgres, right? It’s been a journey.

Corey: One thing that your website talks about is that you accelerate your open-sourced database transformation. And this is a bit of a hobby horse I get on from time to time. I think that there are a lot of misunderstandings when people talk about this. You have the open-source purists—of which I shamefully admit I used to be one—saying that, “Oh, it’s about the idea of purity and open and free as in software.” Great. Okay, awesome. But when I find that corporate customers are talking about when they say open-source database, they don’t particularly care if they have access to the source code because they’re not going to go in and patch a database engine, we hope. But what they do care about is regardless of where they are today—even if they’re perfectly happy there—they don’t want to wind up beholden to a commercial database provider, and/or they don’t want to wind up beholden to the environment that is running within. There’s a strategic Exodus that’s available in theory, which on some level serves to make people feel better about not actually Exodus-ing, but it also means if they’re doing a migration at some point, they don’t also have to completely redo their entire data plan.

Benjamin: Yeah, I think that’s a really good point. I mean, I like to talk—there’s a big rat’s nest of questions and problems in here—but I generally like talk to about open APIs, talk about standards, talk about how much is going to have to change if you eliminate this vendor. We’re definitely not open-source purists. Well, we employ a lot of open-source purists. I also used to be an open—

Corey: Don’t let them hear you say that, then. Fair enough. Fair enough.

Benjamin: [laugh] we have proprietary software at EDB, as well. There’s a kind of wide range of businesses that we participate in. Glad to hear you also mention this where-it’s-hosted angle, as well. I think there’s some degree to which people are—they figured out that having at least open APIs or an open-source-ish database is a good idea rather than being beholden to proprietary database. But then, immediately forget that when they’re picking a cloud vendor, right? And realizing that putting their data in Cloud Vendor A versus Cloud Vendor B is also putting them in a similar difficult situation. They need to be really wary of when they’re doing that. Now, obviously, I work at an independent software company, and I have some incentive to say this, but I do think it’s true. And you know, there’s meaningful data gravity risk.

Corey: I assure you, I have no incentive. I don’t care what cloud provider you’re on. My guidance has been, for years, to—as a general rule—pick a provider, I care about which one, and go all in until there’s a significant reason to switch. Trying to build an optionality, “Oh, everything we do should be fully portable at an instance notice.” Great. Unless you’re actually doing it, you’re more or less, giving up a whole bunch of shortcuts and feature velocity you could otherwise have, in the hopes of one day you’ll do a thing, but all the assumptions you’re surrounded by baked themselves in regardless. So, you’re more or less just creating extra work for yourself for no defined benefit. This is not popular in some circles, where people try to sell something that requires someone to go multi-cloud, but here we are.

Benjamin: No, I think you’re right. I think people underestimate the degree to which the abstractions are just not very good, right, and the degree to which those cloud-specific details are going to leak in if you’re going to try to get anything done, you end up in kind of a difficult place. What I see more frequently is situations where we have a big enterprise—not even big, even medium-sized companies where maybe they’ve done an acquisition or two, they’ve got business units that are trying to do things on their own. And they end up in two or three clouds, sort of by happenstance. It’s not like they’re trying to do replication live between two clouds, but they’ve got one business unit in AWS and one business unit and Azure, and somebody in the corporate—say enterprise architect or something like that—really would like to make things consistent between the two so they get a consistent security posture and things like that. So, there are situations where the multi-cloud is a reality at a certain level, but maybe not at a concrete technical level. But I think it’s still really useful for a lot of customers.

Corey: You position your cloud offering in two different ways. One of them is the idea of BigAnimal, and the other—well, it sort of harkens back to when I was in sixth grade going through the American public school system. They had a cop come in and talk to us and paint to this imaginary story of people trying to push drugs. “Hey, kid. You want to try some of this?” And I’m reading this and it says EDB, Postgres for Kubernetes. And I’m sent back there, where it’s like, “Hey, kid. You want to run your stateful databases on top of Kubernetes?” And my default answer to that is good lord, no. What am I missing?

Benjamin: That’s a good question. Kubernetes has come a long way—I think is part of that.

Corey: Oh, truly. I used to think of containers as a pure story for stateless things. And then, of course, I put state into them, and then, everything exploded everywhere because it turns out, I’m bad at computers. Great. And it has come a long way. I have been tracking a lot of that. But it still feels like the idea being that you’d want to have your database endpoints somewhere a lot less, I guess I’ll call it fickle, if that makes sense.

Benjamin: It’s an interesting problem because we are seeing a lot of people who are interested in our Kubernetes-based products. It’s actually based on—we recently open-sourced the core of it under a project called cloud-native PG. It’s a cool piece of technology. If you think about sort of two by two. In one corner, you’ve got self-managed on-premise databases. So, you’re very, very slow-moving, big-iron type, old-school database deployments. And on the opposite corner, you’ve got fully-managed, in the cloud, BigAnimal, Amazon RDS, that type of thing. There’s a place on that map where you’ve got customers that want a self-service type experience. Whether that’s for production, or maybe it’s even for dev tests, something like that. But you don’t want to be giving the management capability off to a third party.

For folks that want that type of experience, trying to build that themselves by, like, wiring up EC2 instances, or doing something in their own data center with VMware, or something like that, can be extremely difficult. Whereas if you’ve go to a Kubernetes-based product, you can get that type of self-service experience really easily, right? And customers can get a lot more flexibility out of how they run their databases and operate their databases. And what sort of control they give to, say application developers who want to spin up a new database for a test or for some sort of small microservice, that type of thing. Those types of workloads tend to work really well with this first-party Kubernetes-based offering. I’ve been doing databases on Kubernetes in managed services for a long time as well. And I don’t, frankly, have any concerns about doing it. There are definitely some sharp edges. And if you wanted to do to-scale, you need to really know what you’re doing with Kubernetes because the naive thing will shoot you in the foot.

Corey: Oh, yes. So, some it feels almost like people want to cosplay working for Google, but they don’t want to pass the technical interview along the way. It’s a bit of a weird moment for it.

Benjamin: Yeah, I would agree.

Corey: I have to go back to my own experiences with using RDS back at my last real job before I went down this path. We were migrating from EC2-Classic to VPC. So, you could imagine what dates me reasonably effectively. And the big problem was the database. And the joy that we had was, “Okay, we have to quiesce the application.” So, the database is now quiet, stop writes, take a snapshot, restore that snapshot into the environment. And whenever we talk to AWS folks, it’s like, “So, how long is this going to take?” And the answer was, “Guess.” And that was not exactly reassuring. It went off without a hitch because every migration has one problem. We were sideswiped in an Uber on the way home. But that’s neither here nor there. This was two o’clock in the morning, and we finished in half the maintenance time we had allotted. But it was the fact that, well, guess we’re going to have to take the database down for many hours with no real visibility, and we hope it’ll be up by morning. That wasn’t great. But that was the big one going on, on an ongoing basis, there were maintenance windows with a database. We just stopped databasing for a period of time during a fairly broad maintenance window. And that led to a whole lot of unfortunate associations in my mind with using relational databases for an awful lot of stuff. How do you handle maintenance windows and upgrading and not tearing down someone’s application? Because I have to assume, “Oh, we just never patch anything. It turns out that’s way easier,” is in fact, the wrong answer.

Benjamin: Yeah, definitely. As you point out, there’s a bunch of fundamental limitations here, if we start to talk about how Postgres actually fits together, right? Pretty much everybody in RDS is a little bit weird. The older RDS offerings are a little bit weird in terms of how they do replication. But most folks are using Postgres streaming replication, to do high availability, Postgres in managed services. And honestly, of course—

Corey: That winds up failing over, or the application’s aware of both endpoints and switches to the other one?

Benjamin: Yeah—

Corey: Sort of a database pooling connection or some sort of proxy?

Benjamin: Right. There’s a bunch of subtleties that get into their way. You say, well, did the [vit 00:16:16] failover too early, did the application try to connect and start making requests before the secondaries available? That sort of thing.

Corey: Or you misconfigure it and point to the secondary, suddenly, when there’s a switchover of some database, suddenly, nothing can write, it can only read, then you cause a massive outage on the weekend?

Benjamin: Yeah. Yeah.

Corey: That may have been of an actual story I made up.

Benjamin: [laugh] yeah, you should use a managed service.

Corey: Yeah.

Benjamin: So, it’s complicated, but even with managed services, you end up in situations where you have downtime, you have maintenance windows. And with Postgres, especially—and other databases as well—especially with Postgres, one of the biggest concerns you have is major version upgrades, right? So, if I want to go from Postgres 12 to 13, 13 to 14, I can’t do that live. I can’t have a single cluster that is streaming one Postgres version to another Postgres version, right?

So, every year, people want to put things off for two years, three years sometimes—which is obviously not to their benefit—you have this maintenance, you have some sort of downtime, where you perform a Postgres upgrade. At EDB, we’ve got—so this is a big problem, this is a problem for us. We’re involved in the Postgres community. We know this is challenging. That’s just a well-known thing. Some of the folks that are working EDB are folks who worked on the Postgres logical replication tech, which arrived in Postgres 10. Logical replication is really a nice tool for doing things like change data capture, you can do Walter JSON, all these types of things are based on logical replication tech.

It’s not really a thing, at least, the code that’s in Postgres itself doesn’t really support high availability, though. It’s not really something that you can use to build a leader-follower type cluster on top of. We have some techs, some proprietary tech within EDB that used to be called bi-directional replication. There used to be an open-source project called bi-directional replication. This is a kind of a descendant of that. It’s now called Postgres Distributed, or EDB Postgres Distributed is the product name. And that tech actually allows us—because it’s based on logical replication—allows us to do multiple major versions at the same time, right? So, we can upgrade one node in a cluster to Postgres 14, while the other nodes in the clusters are at Postgres 13. We can then upgrade the next node. We can support these types of operations in a kind of wide range of maintenance operations without taking a cluster down from maintenance.

So, there’s a lot of interesting opportunities here when we start to say, well, let’s step back from what your typical assumptions are for Postgres streaming replication. Give ourselves a little bit more freedom by using logical replication instead of physical streaming replication. And then, what type of services, and what type of patterns can we build on top of that, that ultimately help customers build, whether it’s faster databases, more highly available databases, so on and so forth.

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Corey: One approach that I took for, I guess you could call it backup sort of, was intentionally staggering replication between the primary and the replica about 15 minutes or so. So, if I drop a production table or something like that, I have 15 short minutes to realize what has happened and sever the replication before it is now committed to the replica and now I’m living in hell. It felt like this was not, like, option A, B, or C, or the right way to do things. But given that meeting customers where they are as important, is that the sort of thing that you support with BigAnimal, or do you try to talk customers into not being ridiculous?

Benjamin: That’s not something we support now. It’s not actually something that I hear that many asks for these days. It’s kind of interesting, that’s a pattern that I’ve run into a lot in the past.

Corey: I was an ancient, grumpy sysadmin. Again, I’m dating myself here. These days, I just store everything at DNS text records, and it’s way easier. But I digress.

Benjamin: [laugh] yeah, it’s something that we see a lot for and we had support for a point-in-time restore, like pretty much anybody else in the business at this point. And that’s usually the, “I fat-fingered something,” type response. Honestly, I think there’s room to be a bit more flexible and room to do some more interesting things. I think RDS is setting a bar and a lot of database services out there and kind of just meeting that bar. And we all kind of need to be pushing a little bit more into more interesting spaces and figuring out how to get customers more value, get customers to get more out of their money for the database, honestly.

Corey: One of the problems we tend to see, in the database ecosystem at large, without naming names or companies or anything like that, is that it’s a pretty thin and blurry line between database advocate, database evangelist, and database zealot. Where it feels like instead, we’re arguing about religion more than actual technical constraints and concerns. So, here’s a fun question that hopefully isn’t too much of a gotcha. But what sort of workloads would you actively advise someone not to use BigAnimal for in the database world? But yes, again, if you try to run a DNS server, it’s probably not fit for purpose without at least a shim in the way there. But what sort of workloads are you not targeting that a customer is likely to have a relatively unfortunate time with?

Benjamin: Large-scale analytical workloads is the easy answer to that, right? If you’ve got a problem where you’re choosing between Postgres and Snowflake, you’re seriously considering—you actually have as much data that you seriously be considering Snowflake? You probably don’t want to be using Postgres, right? You want to be using something that’s column, or you want to be using a query planner that really understands a columnar layout that’s going to get you the sorts of performance that you need for those analytical workloads. We don’t try to touch that space.

Corey: Yeah, we’re doing some of that right now with just the sheer volume of client AWS bills we have. We don’t really need a relational model for a lot of it. And Athena is basically fallen down on the job in some cases, and, “Oh, do you want to use Redshift, that’s basically Postgres.” It’s like, “Yeah, it’s Postgres, if it decided to run on bars of gold.” No, thank you. It just becomes this ridiculously overwrought solution for what feels like it should be a lot similar. So, it’s weird, six months ago or so I wouldn’t have had much of an idea what you’re talking about. I see it a lot better now. Generally, by virtue of trying to do something the precise wrong way that someone should.

Benjamin: Right. Yeah, exactly. I think there’s interesting room for Postgres to expand here. It’s not something that we’re actively working on. I’m not aware of a lot happening in the community that Postgres is, for better or worse, extremely extensible, right? And if you see the JSON-supported Postgres, it didn’t exist, I don’t know, five, six years ago. And now it’s incredibly powerful. It’s incredibly flexible. And you can do a lot of quote-unquote, schemaless stuff straight in Postgres. Or you look at PostGIS, right, for doing GIS geographical data, right? That’s really a fantastic integration directly in the database.

Corey: Yeah, before that people start doing ridiculous things almost looks similar to a graph database or a columnar store somehow, and yeah.

Benjamin: Yeah, exactly. I think sometimes somebody will do a good column store that’s an open-source deeply integrated into Postgres, rather than—

Corey: I’ve seen someone build one on top of S3 bucket with that head, a quarter of a trillion objects in it. Professional advice, don’t do that.

Benjamin: [laugh]. Unless you’re Snowflake. So, I mean, it’s something that I’d like to see Postgres expand into. I think that’s an interesting space, but not something that, at least especially for BigAnimal, and frankly, for a lot of EDB customers. It’s not something we’re trying to push people toward.

Corey: One thing that I think we are seeing a schism around is the idea that some vendors are one side of it, some are on the other, where on the one side, you have, oh, every workload should have a bespoke, purpose-built database that is exactly for this type of workload. And the other school of thought is you should generally buy us for a general-purpose database until you have a workload that is scaled and significant to a point where running that on its own purpose-built database begins to make sense. I don’t necessarily think that is a binary choice, where do you tend to fall on that spectrum?

Benjamin: I think everybody should use Postgres. And I say not just because I work in a Postgres company.

Corey: Well, let’s be clear. Before this, you were at IBM for five years working on a whole bunch of database stuff over there, not just Postgres. And you, so far, have not struck me as the kind of person who’s like, “Oh, so what’s your favorite database?” “The one that pays me.” We’ve met people like that, let’s be very clear. But you seem very even-handed in those conversations.

Benjamin: Yeah, I got my start in databases, actually, with Apache CouchDB. I am a committer on CouchDB. I worked on a managed at CouchDB service ten years ago. At IBM, I worked on something in nine different open-source databases and managed services. But I love having conversations about, like, well, I’ve got this workload, should I use Postgres, rr should I use Mongo, should I use Cassandra, all of those types of discussions. Frankly, though, I think in a lot of cases people are—they don’t understand how much power they’re missing out on if they don’t choose a relational database. If they don’t understand the relational model well enough to understand that they really actually want that. In a lot of cases, people are also just over-optimizing too early, right? It’s just going to be much faster for them to get off the ground, get product in customers hands, if they start with something that they don’t have to think twice about. And they don’t end up with this architecture with 45 different databases, and there’s only one guy in the company that knows how to manage the whole thing.

Corey: Oh, the same story of picking a cloud provider. It’s, “Okay, you hire a team, you’re going to build a thing. Which cloud provider do you pick?” Every cloud provider has a whole matrix and sales deck, and the rest. The right answer, of course, is the one your team’s already familiar with because learning a new cloud provider while trying not to run out of money at your startup, can’t really doesn’t work super well.

Benjamin: Exactly. Yeah.

Corey: One thing that I think has been sort of interesting, and when I saw it, it was one of those, “Oh, I sort of like them.” Because I had that instinctive reaction and I don’t think I’m alone in this. As of this recording a couple of weeks ago, you folks received a sizable investment from private equity. And default reaction to that is, “Oh, well, I guess I put a fork in the company, they’re done.” Because the narrative is that once private equity takes an investment, well, that company’s best days are probably not in front of it. Now, the counterpoint is that this is not the first time private equity has invested in EDB, and you folks from what I can tell are significantly better than you were when I was your customer a decade ago. So clearly, there is something wrong with that mental model. What am I missing?

Benjamin: Yeah. Frankly, I don’t know. I’m no expert in funding models and all of those sorts of things. I will say that my experience has been what I’ve seen at EDB, has definitely been that maybe there’s private equity, and then there’s private equity. We’re in this to build better products and become a better product company. We were previously owned by a private equity firm for the past four years or so. And during the course of those four years, we brought on a bunch of folks who were very product-focused, new leadership. We made a significant acquisition of a company called 2ndQuadrant, which they employed a lot of the European best Postgres company. Now, they’re part of EDB and most of them have stayed with us. And we built the managed cloud service, right? So, this is a pretty significant—private equity company buying us to invest in the company. I’m optimistic that that’s what we’re looking at going forward.

Corey: I want to be clear as well, I’m not worried about what I normally would be in a private equity story about this, where they’re there to save money and cut costs, and, “Do we really need all these database replicas floating around,” and, “These backups, seems like that’s something we don’t need.” You have, at last count, 32 Postgres contributors, 7 Postgres committers, and 3 core members. All of whom would run away screaming loudly and publicly, in the event that such a thing were taking place. Of all the challenges and concerns I might have about someone running a cloud service in the modern day. I do not have any fear that you folks are not doing what will very clearly be shown to be the right thing by your customers for the technology that you’re building on top of. That is not a concern. There are companies I do not have that confidence in, to be clear.

Benjamin: Yeah, I’m glad to hear that. I’m a hundred percent on board as well. I work here, but I think we’re doing the right thing, and we’re going to be doing great stuff going forward.

Corey: One last topic I do want to get into a little bit is, on some level, launching in this decade, a cloud-hosted database offering at a time when Amazon—whose product strategy of yes is in full display—it seems like something ridiculous, that is not necessarily well thought out that why would you ever try to do this? Now, I will temper that by the fact that you are clearly succeeding in this direction. You have customers who say nice things about you, and the reviews have been almost universally positive anywhere I can see things. The negative ones are largely complaining about databases, which I admit might be coming from me.

Benjamin: Right, it is a crowded space. There’s a lot of things happening. Obviously, Amazon, Microsoft, Google are doing great things, both—

Corey: Terrible things, but great, yes. Yes.

Benjamin: [laugh] right, there’s good products coming in. I think AlloyDB is not necessarily a great product. I haven’t used it myself yet, but it’s an interesting step in the direction. I’m excited to see development happening. But at the end of the day, we’re a database company. Our focus is on building great databases and supporting great databases. We’re not entering this business to try to take on Amazon from an infrastructure point of view. In fact, the way that we’re structuring the product is really to try to get the strengths of both worlds. We want to give customers the ability to get the most out of the AWS or Azure infrastructure that they can, but come to us for their database.

Frankly, we know Postgres better than anybody else. We have a greater ability to get bugs fixed in Postgres than anybody else. We’ve got folks working on the database in the open. We got folks working on the database proprietary for us. So, we give customers things like break/fix support on that database. If there is a bug in Postgres, there’s a bug in the tech that sits around Postgres. Because obviously, Postgres is not a batteries-included system, really. We’re going to fix that for you. That’s part of the contract that we’re giving to our customers. And I know a lot of smaller companies maybe haven’t been burned by this sort of thing very much. We start to talk about enterprise customers and medium, larger-scale customers, this starts to get really valuable. The ability to have assurance on top of your open-source product. So, I think there’s a lot of interesting things there, a lot of value that we can provide there.

I think also that I talked a little bit about this earlier, but like the box, this sort of RDS-shaped box, I think is a bit too small. There’s an opportunity for smaller players to come in and try to push the boundaries of that. For example, giving customers more support by default to do a good job using their database. We have folks on board that can help consult with customers to say, “No, you shouldn’t be designing your schemas that way. You should be designing your schemas this way. You should be using indexes here,” that sort of stuff. That’s been part of our business for a long time. Now, with a managed service, we can bake that right into the managed service. And that gives us the ability to kind of make that—you talk about shared responsibility between the service writer and the customer—we can change the boundaries of that shared responsibility a little bit, so that customers can get more value out of the managed database service than they might expect otherwise.

Corey: There aren’t these harsh separations and clearly defined lines across which nothing shall pass, when it makes sense to do that in a controlled responsible way.

Benjamin: Right, exactly. Some of that is because we’re a database company, and some of that is because, frankly, we’re much smaller.

Corey: I’ll take it a step further beyond that, as well, that I have seen this pattern evolve a number of times where you have a customer running databases on EC2, and their AWS account managers suggests move to RDS. So, they do. Then, move to Aurora. So, they do. Then, I move this to DynamoDB. At which point, it’s like, what do you think your job is here, exactly? Because it seems like every time we move databases, you show up in a nicer car. So, what exactly is the story here, and what are the incentives? Where it just feels like there is a, “Whatever you’re doing is not the way that it should be done. So, it’s time to do, yet, another migration.”

There’s something to be said for companies who are focused around a specific aspect of things. Then once that is up and working and running, great. Keep on going. This is fine. As opposed to trying to chase the latest shiny, on some level. I have a big sense of, I guess, affinity for companies that wind up knowing where they start, and most notably, where they stop.

Benjamin: Yeah, I think that’s a really good point. I don’t think that we will be building an application platform anytime soon.

Corey: “We’re going to run Lambda functions on top of a database.” It’s like, “Congratulations. That is the weirdest stored procedure I can imagine this week, but I’m sure we can come up with a worse one soon.”

Benjamin: Exactly.

Corey: I really want to thank you for taking the time to speak with me so much about how you’re thinking about this, and what you’ve been building over there. If people want to learn more, where’s the best place to go to find you?

Benjamin: biganimal.com.

Corey: Excellent. We will throw a link to that in the show notes and it only just occurred to me that the Postgres mascot is an elephant, and now I understand why it’s called BigAnimal. Yeah, that’s right. He who laughs last, thinks slowest, and today, that’s me. I really want to thank you for being so generous with your time. I appreciate it.

Benjamin: Thank you. I really appreciate it.

Corey: Benjamin Anderson, CTO for Cloud at EDB. I’m Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you’ve hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with an angry comment that you then wind up stuffing into a SQLite database, converting to Base64, and somehow stuffing into the comment field.

Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.

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