Sugu Sougoumarane is the CTO and Co-Founder of PlanetScale, a database as a service platform company. Previously, he worked at PayPal and YouTube on databases and other scalability problems, and he’s one of the creators of Vitess, a graduated CNCF database project that served as YouTube’s metadata storage for several years.

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We discuss his early days at PayPal and YouTube, their initial scalability problems, the technology that helped them scale out their products, the motivation behind Vitess, its evolution into PlanetScale, and some of the innovative ideas coming out of PlanetScale today.

Highlights

5:00 - Being interviewed, and hired by Elon Musk at X.com. Working with some of the PayPal mafia like Max Levchin and Reid Hoffman.

9:00 - Solving PayPal’s unbalanced books via a better Activity Report

15:00 - PayPal’s Oracle database and the initial idea of sharding.

20:00 - Early YouTube architecture and culture, and the consequences of explosive growth.

24:00 - Sharding YouTube’s database.

32:00 - The story behind Vitess. It all started with a spreadsheet.

40:00 - How a user with 250,000 auto-generated videos caused YouTube to go down. How Vitess fixed that, and the implications of a SQL proxy.

45:00 - The motivation behind keeping Vitess open source, and interest from other companies dealing with similar problems. The motivation behind going from Vitess to PlanetScale

53:00 - How PlanetScale can improve on some traditional relational database developer experience. How NoSQL was never actually about getting rid of SQL and was more about skipping traditionally rigid schemas. MongoDB’s support for SQL, and PlanetScale’s approach to solving schema changes.

58:00 - Technical innovations coming out of PlanetScale.

1:05:00 - Running databases in containers and the implications

Episode source