Open Source Databases

hi everybody welcome back to the 11th episode of open source for business brought to you by open teams i hope that

you all had a great holiday period and trust that you’re getting back into the swing of things at work for what i hope is a great 2021 for all

of you in this episode of open source for business i talked with matt yonkovit who is the chief

experience officer at picona piccona is a service provider for open

source databases like mariadb mysql and postgresql

for over 10 years matt worked as a database architect before transitioning into consulting roles of

both mysql and sun microsystems he’s got over 25 years of experience in both open

source and databases so needless to say the lessons that i learned in this podcast were invaluable

to me and i’m sure they’ll be invaluable to you too as i mentioned before this podcast is brought to you by open

teams the first open source services marketplace where users of open source software

can find vet and contract with service providers so now that we’re ready let’s cue the

music [Applause]

i thought i’d kick it off by um just talking about so you started you’re currently the chief experience officer

at picona and pocona offers uh in short just open source database solutions we’ll dive a

bit more into that in a little bit but at the moment you’re currently focused on the client and

uh customers but i know when researching for this podcast i learned that you actually are techie for a large part of

your career uh you i think for the better part of 10 years or over 10 years we’re a database

architect so can you walk us through that evolution to give us an idea of how you got here

today sure no problem i mean this starts way back when i was in uh college actually and i worked for

an internet service provider and uh when i started uh you know i started in tech support

right so so back in the days of dial-up modems when you know you you got that squeal every time you

dialed we were one of the competitors to aol just a small kind of mom-and-pop place

and after working there for about a year uh the the vp of engineering came over and he says

well you know you’ve been here a year you’re doing a good job what do you want your career to be i’m like i don’t know i’m still in college it’s like well go back think

about it so back then uh before there were job boards i went and i looked in the newspaper actually

because you know job boards were fairly new and i found that hey oracle dbas pay pretty well compared

to like programmers i’m like you know i think i want to be a dba and i didn’t know what an nga was

yeah yeah i didn’t know what a dba was but it looked like it paid a lot there are a lot of jobs for it so

i think we need that and so you know you could be it and that’s how my career

as a database admin started but from there i actually continued that

with several larger companies so uh penske logistics ge owned company

i worked for insurance companies i worked for fortune 500 companies uh a little bit of here and there and i

always worked on the you know oracle sql server db2 space all these different database technologies

but then i started to get hooked on hooked on open source and so it really was interesting i

started doing some development on my own starting to deploy mysql postgres try some different things

and i saw an ad for a company looking for a consultant and that that company

happened to be mysql a b right so back in the day i used them

in my my own you know website my own their own company that i was running and i’m like that sounds kind of cool

and so i got a job working for mysql ab as a consultant and my job was to parachute into

god knows where like so it was all over the country all over the world you know to help people not only get the

most out of mysql but also get the most out of open source we kind of went up and down the stack a little bit you

know playing around with apache phps and pearl some ruby a little bit of everything uh

to try and get people to uh adopt open source more and uh for for about a couple years my my my address

was the hilton um because i traveled all over the world all right no it’s pretty hard to complain

uh well i mean you know for me it was was kind of cool for my wife she didn’t really care for it that much but yeah

um you know so it tends to you know be one of those things but i learned so much and i used to be

an introvert uh i used to not you know like to talk to people back in the early days i was

more of the guy who let me have my database let me sit in the corner let me tune some queries let

me do some of these things but when i started to go from client to client and do

some some really cool things we started to find out that you know you had to change your

mentality you had to like you know flip who you were because every week you’re introduced to someone

new and they have a new problem and you need to establish a rapport and credibility so

it really had to kind of flip my mindset and i found that i was really good at

connecting with people and telling people you know kind of the background and the story of why this mattered what we were doing how it would work

and from there i continued to grow and shortly before um mysql got the

acquired well or sun got acquired by oracle um you know after the the sun acquisition

um you know uh the founder of percona peter zaitsev um and i started talking about moving

over there and he had come from mysql as well so we had known each other and moved over there to basically do the same thing

drop in from customer to customer to customer so i started to learn all about what customers need and want

in this open source space in this database space and it was this really really cool you know background and it was it was really

engaging but i found that i could talk to customers customers kept on asking for me personally

and they wanted more of what i could do and so that grew into a role where i took

you know responsibility for managing the team so the team of you know consultants that you know was at percona

i managed the first the americas team so out of america’s then the global team um then eventually we added support and

managed service and so you know as as time went on we found more activities that our customers needed

they wanted more ways to help them be successful and you know i was able to make that

connection with how they wanted to be you know shown uh you know the these products how they needed to be helped

you know what sort of things work what sort of things didn’t and uh that continued to snowball until eventually i was you know in charge of

global services then customer success and the chief customer officer for a while and now uh chief experience officer kind

of looking to see what we can do for that customer experience side that we did after the sale happened and

and run it all the way through community and all the way through the the the the process before someone

buys before they even you know know that you exist how do we bring that awesome customer you know knowledge experience throughout

the entire you know um uh organization and the entire uh customer journey and so it’s been a

really exciting you know eclectic ride you know it’s have a lot of pivots and a lot of back and forth but it was very exciting

that is very exciting i remember you first mentioned the other day that used to be an introvert and i was shocked i thought how it doesn’t make sense but

i guess you must have trained and trained and trained and and just gotten over that need like how was that

then did you find that you were the not the only person in open source that is an introvert because i know that it

seems like there’s quite a few interests in the open source space well it’s funny that they fall into a couple of categories right so a lot of

contributors end up being introverts right so you have a lot of you know uh people who develop some

awesome code but you know talking publicly unless it’s technical okay they can talk technical all day long

right and uh you know unless it’s technical you know then um you know the the they

have difficult time because it’s it’s something that just they’re not comfortable with they want to talk tech to tech we used to have a

consultant who you know um was brilliant guy and you know we would go out

you know when we had group get-togethers you know all the consultants would come in and you know we would go and you know you’d

drink beer and you would you know eat pizza you know you’d do whatever event that you had you try and decompress and you’d be

talking about something you’d turn to him and say like oh how’s it going and he would immediately jump right into like you know memory tuning variables and

kernel debugging parameters and everything else you’re like great and then you go back and you’ll be talking about like what your kids are

going to do what your wife is doing this weekend you know your hobbies whatever you go back to him and more colonel tuning

right and that’s cool because there’s those people who thrive on that as well uh but you do see a lot of extroverts as

well because when you look at the community um that open source has brought up there’s a lot of passion

and there’s a lot of people who love open source so much and they love to share it and that’s what’s so exciting about the

open source community in the open source spaces is you get the people who are really comfortable talking tech and they love

to share that tech but you also get the people who are very passionate about open source and they love to preach evangelize and

you know tell people about how awesome it is and so it was that passion always there is that a recent thing in the last

decade or what did you witness over your time as it sort of evolved well i think it’s it’s always been there

but it’s been a smaller community early on right and so now you’re seeing

more widespread acceptance and you know it’s it’s funny you know back when i started my sqlab

my first day i came from the enterprise right so i’m all stuffy you know

i know what to do in the background uh my first day there uh martin mikos uh had decided before i

arrived uh to move the company towards an open core model so uh you know and as you know open core

you know has some you know big you know uh you know proponents and some big opponents

right you know the open core debate has raged on for a very very long time uh but during that movement for mysql

there was a all company email thread where mark mikos was called the devil and people were like you know you’re gonna burn it out for this and like you

know all kinds of just like crazy stuff and i go to my wife oh my god i can’t believe this someone’s gonna get fired

the first day here somebody’s gonna get fired because look at all this you know this this debate look at all this this anger

and no one got fired and i’m like what and then i remember my boss telling me well no no we we appreciate the debate

everyone has a voice everyone we want to hear that you know that you know you’re you know the the opposition we want to

understand it we want to embrace it just because you you you take a passionate stance doesn’t necessarily

mean that you’re right or wrong but you do have that capability and and that’s something that’s always stuck

with me is that you know awesome you know openness and that awesome willingness to debate

and to to stand on your principles um even if you you you are pat and passionate

disagreement right you’re still going to be able to you know at the end of the day see eye to eye because you both respect one another

um you know in each other’s view that’s that’s just an awesome place to to well no i love that response and i

think definitely just the idea of passion driving this thing is led to where it is today most companies now using open source

everyone’s at least heard about it or has a little bit of an idea about it and i think it’s hopefully that continues hopefully that

grows do you think that’s something that’s going to continue into perpetuity or well absolutely i mean it continues to

grow but it’s evolving into some weird spaces right because now we’ve got what is open source and what

is not open source and so there are a lot of products now who are evolving to a

not necessarily open source community driven model and you know it’s it’s a it’s a little

bit of a wolves and sheep’s clothing when you think about it because you know we’re open source compatible open source compatible which means we’re

compatible with you know other open source products or you know kind of open source like but really open source um so how do you you

know handle those and when you start to look at you know there’s been a massive amount of debate on cloud

providers and what they’ve done with open source and a lot of them have enhanced open source to the point where it’s no longer

open and so you’ve got that as well you’ve got you know companies like mongodb who have come out

and said uh you know we’ve never really developed mongodb as open source to accept

contributions we’ve developed it as a freemium model as a business model right so you’ve got these different

intentions from different companies and sometimes that hurts the innovation it hurts the passion of some of those

communities other times you still have compassionate communities it’s just they’re not at the technical depth that some of the other

communities are postgres for instance has an insanely awesome community of very passionate deeply

technical people who understand the internals of postgres mongodb’s community is very developer

friendly and very focused on developers they don’t necessarily know the ins and outs of the underlying source code so

you get these different groups that that kind of pop up but as the new generation

is starting to adopt open source software how they’re adopting it isn’t the same way and so there is a little risk that you

know some of the the control you know contributors and the the contributions and what uh that initial kind of round

brought to us uh might not be the same in the second round because you might not have access to

the source code for the product that you use you might be using you know a cloud provider’s version of mysql or postgres

um and you know or a mongodb compatible version and you know so you click it up you spin

it it’s up and running and now all of a sudden you don’t have access to the source code to take a look to innovate to

find out how these things work um and so that’s going to be a challenge for a lot of folks

and what are some of the impacts that you think that’s going to have on the open source software industry and is that something i guess we’ll start with that question

and the second question is that something that’s coming in we’ll see the negative impacts in the next five years 10 years when do you

think well i mean i think that you know you you know it’s is it going to have a negative impact no

more people are going to adopt it right and that’s good the bigger the the the open source pie the better

for all of us right because we want to make the the the pie bigger we want more open source adoption the challenge

that i think you’re going to run into is we’re generating you know we’re we’re in a generation where we’re developing a group of people who

don’t necessarily have the same knowledge of the internal workings or how you know the open source software

that they’re running um actually works and we keep on getting you know magnitudes of degree away from

that back end especially as you start to see you know x as a service um solutions start to pop up right so

instead of having to spin up your own wordpress or you know your your own joomla

or you know uh magento yeah you know you go to the one click now and

you spin it up so you don’t have to know which is great for speed right but you you you lose some of the

capabilities the background to understand how it works and why it’s doing certain things

and you know that that that’s very limiting and so you’re going to see a need for

expertise continue to rise and there’s going to be a shortfall because honestly

while you know a lot of the software and a lot of the tooling that we’ve seen developed over the last few years through the x’s of service through

you know kubernetes through the one-click deployments they’re awesome in you know bringing you know databases

and you know development uh tools to the masses um they hide that complexity and a lot of

people know how to click the button they know how to spin up additional instances they know how to move to the next instance size and increase

you know the spend they don’t necessarily know how to get the most out of what they’re already

using and and that’s where you you know i like to say you need kind of this robocop approach half human half cyborg

right you know a half robot you know it’s the cyborg approach you know you’re going to need someone who knows what they’re doing um

you know at some point and and that’s where you know there’s a lot of um room for growth for those who are

really interested in the open source space to become an open source expert to understand the internal workings and help evangelize

people who might be used to that one click the one you know button solution and how these

actually work and help them get the most out of those solutions as well okay and what uh capacity do you think

that person comes in as a bad open source expert or do you are you looking are you looking to hire internally to deal with

this problem or do you go outside and look for say service providers to help out what is the solution to this problem

well it’s you know most larger companies and it depends on the company size okay

um and so what we found and we’ve we’ve we’ve surveyed the the industry you know um quite extensively on this

but what we found is um you know most companies will start looking for their own internal hires they’ll try

and bring on hires um it’s not easy especially in the database space right database

is kind of a boring technology if you will it’s not terribly exciting for a lot of

developers um you know it’s it’s you know kind of like you know oh you’re the database administrator oh you

know we don’t we don’t talk to you guys we’re we’re on the edgy stuff right um and so when you talk about like you know

database stuff it’s really hard to find you know good qualified open source dvas and a lot of technology has made it so

you know oh you don’t have to um so a lot of companies will first look to elevate their existing staff into those

open source roles and so they’ll take developers who might be you know good at sql server or you know

might be good at you know.net or you know whatever and they’ll try and turn them into open source you know people which

sometimes works sometimes doesn’t um i think you know a lot of times you know the folks find that you know

the the features or the the the polish or the the enterprise

focus of some of these these things is missed because you know a lot of these you know uh developers or

dbas have been in this space for so long working with oracle or sql server or db2 that it’s really hard to make that

transition and so you know you’ll start there but then when you can’t find them then you’ll

slowly try and build out teams you’ll try and you know compete but you’re competing with some really big companies in the smaller more agile

companies have really interesting use cases and everybody wants to work for those you know silicon valley unicorns right

you know if your choice is working for you know you know big bank usa or working for you know

facebook or twitter you’re probably gonna go facebook or twitter you know if those are your choices right and so you know you see that talent gap there

and so you end up trying to hire and you know to build the expertise but in a lot of cases

you’re going to end up you know augmenting that with services with tooling and so we’re seeing a rise in the number

of people who are looking for managed service help or you know one-off help

you know some training some mentoring you know trying to be that kind of spirit guide or the guru to

you know the existing staff that they have so you you’re seeing kind of a combination of things there isn’t one solution to fit

all a lot of it depends on how wide deep you’re trying to get with the technology

and where you’re going now on the development side of the open source house honestly we’re much better off than we are in the database space because

colleges universities you know boot camps for for coders all of them are not focused on

proprietary tools they’re all focused on the open source space so you’re seeing that adoption move very

very fast there and so it’s easier on the development side to find

you know the the the people who actually know the technology stack and um you know

want to use it um read an interesting stat i don’t remember where it was but i think it was something like 70

and you know i don’t know if this is the exact number but it’s like 70 of you know uh college-age graduates are

using the stack that they’re going to develop in as one of the key drivers for what position they choose right so you know

wow so yeah yeah i i remember reading that from some business magazine um and so if that’s that’s the case

um then that is a powerful you know indication that people are really really

passionate about what stack is cool and interesting and what’s going to you know help you know them uh advance in their career

what’s going to scratch their niche yeah okay that’s really interesting and i think

so we sort of got to wait then i guess for these students to come out and the people who’ve been in the code camps do we have a huge

influx of experts um looking after it i definitely know that’s something that open teams that works on too is an idea of a placement

program whereby you take someone in you upskill them and you get them ready uh and i think this would be

something that’s definitely going to be in demand very very soon and if not now like obviously you’re saying it’s already a big problem well in what what’s what’s

what’s interesting is there’s so many open source projects out there right um so you know for mysql for instance if

you go out to github and look at mysql there’s over a hundred thousand mysql projects there’s two thousand different ways to

do high availability on github right so like there’s so many and finding the right expert for the right

thing even when you have you know like you know college kids and college graduates and people going through coder camps

you know learning how to code in python or ruby the frameworks in the libraries and the

integration pieces are so critical having an expert who can come in and help you with those is is really really critical yeah i think

that’s also just not really to talk about it too much but in open teams that’s definitely our thesis that we’re building upon is this idea that open source really is a

long tail of open source projects uh the red hat the ibm’s there they’re helping to

provide support and training and everything you need around these popular large open source projects but like you said there’s hundreds of

thousands hundreds of thousands of other projects out there which companies are building their critical software infrastructure on

but it’s quite hard to find these companies it’s quite hard to find a certain different company for every

single different project so that’s what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to make it easy to find vet and contract with those service

providers yeah no and i mean here here’s the thing the the bigger the enterprise and the the more

established you know the the enterprise and and really even like the small to medium-sized businesses now that have mission

critical open source applications they’re looking for a stack that that will work together and they can get

support and help right um well we’ve found that you know you know from

the database base 66 of dbas prefer to self support okay

that means a third of the industry need help or want help wow okay um and so you know

that self-support you know that’s where you know for us a lot of those people come in and they

look for us for consulting help right a one-off i have this thing that i can’t solve

right because even the the smartest people in the world can’t solve everything right somebody needs to be a doctor to a doctor

yeah right but there’s there’s a third of you know the the the 100 billion dollar

open source industry that still wants and needs you know that you know that support and and has a

willingness to pay for it they want those things to work together and um you know the other 66 percent

really kind of sway and move when they have issues and when problems come up

and that’s what really drives them is you know they reach the limits of what they can handle and a lot of times what you’ll find in

these open source um you know stacks is things work really really well

until they don’t right you know hey

everything’s working great i don’t need any help at ten you know a hundred thousand we’re like oh my god you know this is this is crazy

yeah okay and i know just on the idea touch of that survey where i assume that’s where you just pulled that statistic from uh was the

uh recent survey that pocono released called the open source data management software survey um i’ll actually leave a

link in the description for everyone who’s listening or watching um but one interesting fact and i i

think it this probably relates to the same statistic you just use but that is that most companies or a

majority of companies don’t actually have never really paid for open source so they’ve never purchased a freemium

license they’ve never purchased a support contract so why is that is that

changing or well so one of the great things about open source is

you don’t have to pay right and so so you know with people they want to

start with you know limited lock-in so one of the the reasons that we found when we you know in our survey

was that uh people moved to open source databases um you know and we asked what why right

and so 69 said to avoid vendor lock right right they don’t want to be locked

in yep right oracle is the epitome of lock-in for a lot of us old-school dbas who have been around the

block a few times right so they don’t want that lock-in and so you know when you have you know that

that kind of idea that i’m paying and i’m and i’m stuck paying these these folks that drives

people to like say like open source in a lot of people’s minds is free and it can be free if you don’t need

the features or you don’t need you know the open core version or the enterprise version of some of these or you don’t need the support and the

services and the help to maintain it and you know you know if you think about how open source really started

open source caused and it was really what what built the internet as it is today

right so back when i started in my my internet service provider days and i was the oracle dba

right oracle licenses was like a million dollars right yeah so imagine if like you know mark zuckerberg over at facebook was you

know building facebook and his only choice for a database was oracle he wouldn’t have a million

dollars as a harvard you know kid to go out there and buy an oracle license right like

it wouldn’t work right right so by having access to apache and php and perl and python and

like all these different technologies you’ve enabled everything that we love about the internet today

right i mean this is where this group now unfortunately what we’re seeing happen is

that is great for the community um but it does limit your capabilities

as a um publicly traded company or a company that is very focused on

you know shareholder value uh to continue to grow your business because you grow a very steady or a

slower pace so you know you’ve got to find you know the quote-unquote stickiness

if you will in your you know offerings and so for a long time that stickiness was

through open course software with the idea that you produce an enterprise version

and you put things in the enterprise version like backup oh you want to back up your database you’re going to have to pay for

that right you know you could back it up with it shut down but you can’t back it up you know hot

and so yeah yeah who wants that but you start to find you know these features that people look for

and the product teams look for these killer features that are going to cause people to buy you know their software increase your

shareholder value and create the stickiness within the subscription to keep you you

know coming back right mongodb’s you know uh financial statements are really great to read they’re really interesting because they

really pride themselves there’s this line in in there that i love that you know um every every you know quarter like for like 15

or 16 quarters now they’ve had 120 or 125 percent

net retention which means that their business model is predicated on taking what is

currently available and growing it 25 quarter over quarter over quarter how do they do that right

they get you to buy more they get you to spend more money right and so we’ve started to see not

only that you know open core but that’s moved into the you know the cloud space and you know

the the new licenses that have occurred and so now we’ve got you know the cloud providers coming out and they’re saying hey

you can run on our platform here spend a premium to run your database spend a premium to run your software on our

platform and um you know you’ll just pay us instead of paying your vendor and you can avoid the lock-in with the vendor

well the database vendors don’t like that you know because it’s competing with them but you’re

getting locked into these not quite open source databases that are on the cloud providers

um and that’s taking away business from the database vendors so the database vendors have started to change their licensing

and now we’ve got database vendors competing with cloud vendors in this you know totally frenemy relationship

because you know their software runs on one another and they require one another in order to be successful

but we’re going to change our licensing and our structures and prevent you from doing things that

are going to you know steal our business because we need to protect our shareholder value and so that evolution has been happening for

the last few years and unfortunately i think it’s hurting you know the consumers and the users um

you know quite a bit because it limits you know the innovation and it you know stifles some of what um

we’ve seen uh grow the community in the past okay and what do you think how what do

we need to do today to make sure that we can work towards a better future and we don’t because i think definitely something i’ve observed and read quite a

bit about is the idea that um these open core models and similar models have

started off with say gating a lot of features so saying hey you have to pay for a lot of features but as competition has grown

they’ve kind of reduced the amount of features that they can charge for because of the competition so is that

something you’ve observed actually the now now what we’re seeing is not only so so that the features still are gated but

what we’re seeing is that the features are now being reserved for their as a service offerings

so if you run in their cloud you’ll get the features okay and not necessarily in the downloaded

enterprise version so it’s a bit of a shell game there because you know they want you to move to the consumption model because this

consumption model right now is um really it’s scale by credit card right so you know you know you can you could

scale as much as you want as long as your credit card’s good yeah yes and and that’s where you know

it’s it’s interesting to see you know you want to push people to the to that model

and um so so to answer the second question first you know yes we are seeing some more

um you know features not showing up in the enterprise versions um more features trying to drive

adoption of the software in the free version because of the competition

but we’re seeing that offset by people trying to drive them to their database as a service so now you know the model for most

people is let’s get them hooked on the free version and then get them over to the database as a service

version because once they’re in the database as a service version we can get all kinds of information on what they’re doing

but we can also understand intimate details and it increases the stickiness remember that i said the stickiness it

increases the stickiness of that particular product um and so that’s that’s great you know for them um not so great for

consumers if you know you don’t know what you’re doing because you’re gonna pay by that credit card uh but how do we avoid that that’s a

tough one right and so you know one of the things that percona really prides ourselves on is we’re

trying to keep open source open right especially around the databases that’s our goal

our goal is to really keep open source open we want to take the the features

and the things that the community needs and provide them for free right that’s a goal we want you to have

everything you need to be successful in running your own database for free now

if you need our help and our expertise um to help accelerate you know how you

know moving you to you know do what you need faster if you don’t have the the expertise to do it

we have services we have subscriptions that will help you you know we’ll have components that will help you do that quicker faster

you know but we do not believe that anyone should be prevented from running

you know enterprise class software by locked in and they shouldn’t be hidden behind pay

while they shouldn’t lock you in you know to some you know crazy complicated contract

and so that’s where all of the work that we’re doing is focused on them but as we start to

evolve and as we start to look at you know how to prevent this you know um you know

from a widespread community perspective it really takes the the users the developers it takes

the contributors to these projects right you know contributing them to the open source space making sure that they

have you know sane open licenses that people can use and adopt that’s really important right the more

restrictive the license the less likely it is going to be to be picked up and evolved and you know move forward

yeah okay i think that’s probably a good segue just to um touch on picona and and what the company

is so just for those listening what is bacona what do you do what do you mean activities so uh percona is uh 14 years old

uh we um focus on making open source databases more accessible and better for

everyone in the world right our goal like i said is to keep open source databases open

you know that’s what we do and how we do that is we give people you know free educational materials um

our blog right now has hundreds of thousands of readers every month uh you can you know go to

our blog and find out how to you know tune your database optimize it back it up you know set up aha make sure

you get the most out of you know aws everything’s free it’s ungated you know just go there you know

you know find any you know a lot of solutions to a lot of the common problems that exist

right and so we believe in that education that free you know uh material trying to get

people to do better with what is already out there and our philosophy is you know if you

need us um if you know we’re we’re good you know if you you you buy into you know you know the you

know what we can offer for free then you should you should come to us and use us for services help you

help you get better right get you know two three times the value that you normally get just by running as yourself

and so our philosophy has always been focus on helping customers focus on helping users make

them successful and then you know we’ll work with you as you need to work with us as you have

needs to make you more successful with our services and so we’ll help people you know um with you know one-off

problems with their databases through our consulting services we have support services as your spirit guru call us 24×7 right you

know pick up the phone and be like oh my god my database crashed i need some help and we’ll be right there um or you know if you just want to turn

it over to us we have our own managed service department where we just manage people’s you know databases for them around the clock and you know we handle problems

before they come problems and we also you know take that and we we build our own enhanced versions of

mysql postgres to include all of those lock-in features

that enterprise you know versions have for mysql enterprise or enterprise or you know some of the bigger you know

postgres vendors and we put them in the free space right so we unlock them we unlock the

software right so you know imagine that get get the enterprise version for free because again we believe that you

shouldn’t be locked in to get value from open source okay i think that’s great and it’s definitely i think an unique perspective

that a lot of these profit driven companies um at least compared to those

profit-driven companies so i think that’s really inspiring to hear that um i’d like to shift gears a little bit and focus

on um i guess asking a few questions around uh asking a few questions about things that i think companies will definitely

find useful given your experience and given that they uh need help managing their open

source technologies or would like to improve the way they manage their open source technologies uh so i start off i guess by asking what

are some of the key trends that you’ve uh think the company should be aware of in the uh coming decade

as it relates to open source so i think there’s a there’s there’s a few things right so um number one you you don’t have to look

far and this isn’t so far future looking that you know you can’t see the impact that cloud native development has

had on the overall tech ecosystem right um you know the the evolution of

microservices the evolution of you know this cloud native design has made it so you can rapidly prototype

rapidly deploy you know massive amounts of you know applications

in short amount of time right and what that means is instead of you know spending a lot of

time developing individual components you know you can reuse things you can you know um you know definitely take what you’ve

got and scale it you know much further but it means that what we’re entering is a time

when we’ve got more and more complexity than we’ve ever had anywhere before right so again we go

back to our you know my you know talk about uh the open source survey that percona put together right

we see that the number of people who have been growing the number of databases that they have to control

is is massive right so the number of people who reported a thousand databases grew 50 year-over-year okay a thousand databases

okay now just just just imagine right that as a as a professional who has to maintain

said databases that’s a lot right you know and

and so you know the the larger the complexity the more you’re going to see you know um

the need for the proper tooling the need for the proper you know infrastructure the need

for the proper observability features you know and the tuning capabilities right and we see this also with not only

with this the number of you know things that we’re trying to do the number of technologies

okay so we’ve seen a technology explosion happen so when you look at you know it just

will you again use the database base which i’m infinitely familiar with you know um right now more than 92 of

companies are running more than one database in their you know a data center wow right okay so they have like mysql

and postgres and and like so they’re running they’re running like seven eight different databases

right so they have all these different technologies right and you see that also with um technology stacks that are like

development stacks you don’t have generally just a python shop anymore you might have python and ruby and php and

you know yeah you know rust and this that’s the other thing all kind of like in the same you know space

and why is that because we’re shifting a demographic shift where we’re now

pushing responsibility for a lot of the application design into individual development teams and

individual contributors hands and so we’re letting people decide the stacks

and be free to develop quickly because we want a higher faster return on our investment right

how can we enable this team we’ve hired this ruby expert or ruby’s old i shouldn’t use ruby that’s a

horrible thing a go expert that’s dates me right um we hire a go expert and yeah we don’t know go but he’s a go

expert and he’s going to go fast right that’s what goal means go fast so let’s do it you know even though we’re a python shop so now we’ve got go over

here and he he knows postgres but you know the other guys they know mysql so we’ll just add you know this and so what we’re seeing

is the the teams that have to maintain these i call it the great technology inheritance problem because now all of a

sudden they’re inheriting all this technology and they don’t know how to handle it they don’t know like now i’ve got thousands of databases

i’ve got you know hundreds of different you know permutations of application stacks i’ve got all this different

infrastructure i’ve got multiple cloud providers you know how am i going to handle this right and and it causes schizophrenia

because you’ve got so much going on so what are you going to do how are you going to handle it and that problem is probably the biggest

problem that i worry about going forward is as this evolves you know we’re we we

have this need this this you know unshakeable need this this need to grow and to continue to

consume and to add new technologies new resources and that’s not going to change right you

think about like you know everybody’s you know hot to trot on machine learning and ai and all this all that requires data all

that data needs to be stored somewhere and you know does anybody want to get rid of it no

they never want to get rid of it that means more data that means more systems that means more and more and more and

more okay that’s amazing i think that was such a great response and i definitely agree

kind of i falls in line with the next question i want to ask but on the other end of the spectrum is um i

guess some of the benefits of using open source and i know that we touched on it briefly before uh the idea of vendor lock-in that’s one

of the benefits uh also other companies obviously found that it’s it’s free or it’s at least cheaper

than commercial software and often works better but what are some of the benefits that aren’t so

obvious to people or to companies well so you know so i i mentioned before that there’s an

issue with the technology you know gap and the understanding on the database side the application side it is much easier

today to find application people than it was you know 10 years ago right so developers right who can you know code

in you know uh python right i mean you know hey five years ago python you know you know

that was a tough skill to find but you’re seeing it more and more so you know as as open source gets adopted

it is easier to find some of those development skills some of those you know things to help develop your applications but one of the big things

that i’ve seen that is a big benefit um to the open source space and to the open source um you know

you know uh growth is um really understanding you know that this

is a technology that anyone can start with anyone can you know use anyone

can get their hands around and so it’s that freedom it’s that openness it’s the you know distribution if you

will of it across the organization or across the world and really not the organizations across the world

anybody can start their project and be successful with something that you know the biggest companies in the

world use reducing barriers completely it reduces barriers the barrier to entry

has has massively shrunk right yeah so yeah so so now you know it used to be you know

average joe couldn’t do this average joe has access to this which is a blessing and a curse

right you know and i mean honestly this is one of the reasons why a lot of uh you know uh security issues have

happened right so you know i don’t know if you you follow security issues it’s kind of like this thing that i’ve i’ve

tweeted a lot about these every time i see them i like to retweet you know some of these things because they’re really weird you know we see

people who don’t know how to and don’t understand the technology start to deploy technology right ah i’m gonna throw out a mongodb

instance i’m gonna throw out an elastic instance i’m gonna i’m gonna put some data out there and i’m gonna analyze my data i’m gonna make

sure i can see what’s coming out of that right i’m gonna i’m gonna i’m gonna do better and so they’ll start it up

and not realize oh you know maybe i should have set a password uh oops forgot to set a password again that

barrier of entry has come down so far they can do that without understanding those technical bops those technical

details and then all of a sudden they run into problems and then you know here i am with my data hacked three times

um or 30 times actually um i have more free credit monitoring offers than than

i could ever consume in a lifetime my daughter has her inheritance set for free lifetime credit monitoring for

her kids and their kids and their grandkids just because i’ve been hacked so much um but that’s all

because that barrier of entry would you know reduce so much so there’s this double-edged sword it’s awesome that

anybody can jump in but then there’s this dark downside where all of a sudden you know the the the spider-man quote you know

with great power comes great responsibility it’s totally true you know so you know

if if i can give one advice to everybody out there you know if if you are going to deploy a database

please set a password please number one number one thing you do just

with that i can i can personally if that’s my crusade if i can get everyone to set a password i can reduce the

number of data breaches by 50 percent next year just just by that one thing yes yes it’s that high yes yes

oh my goodness wow one line password that almost needs to be a pop-ups alert when everyone

someone sets up a database have you forgotten the password have you put the password in yes it seems very

trivial but yes i guess down the road it has very bad consequences

but um one of the other benefits that i didn’t mention and i will is you know one of the other

kind of really fun and interesting things that i like because i’m

like i said i come from a tech background is with open source you do have the observability and the visibility into

the software itself and what it’s doing and that is something that i cannot understate how important it is

as you scale and grow a company right when you look at you know the silicon valley unicorns

yeah they’ve all done things to modify or enhance the open source software they

use by finding the bottlenecks and the limitations that exist in the software that are relevant to them

and that has enabled them to move in ways that no one could ever have predicted right yeah and so you see open

source projects and new you know features and libraries pop up all the time right i don’t know if you’re familiar with uh vtes

are you familiar with vts um planet scale is a company that is in the mysql ecosystem and they’ve

built the enterprise version of e-test but v-test was an example of that youtube created v-tests early on to

scale mysql they found that their use case for mysql was so limited that they needed

something to build you know to handle the scalability so they were able to look in the code see the see the issues they were able to

build a framework on top of mysql to enable massive scale out and

you know that type of thing can’t be done with some of these other applications that are you know close source and proprietary

yeah definitely that’s that’s fascinating i definitely do agree they get a lift under the hood but they also and you see so many companies now hiring

open source contributors so that their needs can be met in that open source software uh so i couldn’t agree more with with that

benefit but i thought we’d finish off the final question i’d like to ask you seem like an extremely optimistic person

so what are you most excited about when it comes when you think about the future of open source software

what am i most excited about well i mean i think that i am most excited

that you know as as the open source ecosystem continues to grow i want to see what we can do next right

i i think that the next generation of developers who are coming up the next generation of

people are going to develop things that we could never fathom never imagine right and that’s

the great thing about open source is you continually get surprised right and so i want to see the stuff

that i don’t know about i want to see someone come to the stage with a passion about something new and i want to get

shocked i want to get surprised i want to get like inspired and that’s the thing every year

every month every time that there’s a new open source conference every time there’s some new open source software released

you have that capability to just be dazzled and i want to see what’s next

and i think that you know as we continue to grow as we continue to scale as we continue to see adoption across the

board that’s getting more and more likely every day that you’re going to see the next big thing

the next wave right and that’s just so expiring it you know or inspiring it’s

so you know ah inspiring that that it’s just great awesome i think definitely in the age of

20 20 we need that positive we need that positivity we need something that inspires us to get us through but matt thank you so much for joining

us today it has been an absolute pleasure i’ve loved chatting with you and getting to know you and hopefully we’ll have you on back

sometime all right i appreciate it all right thanks man so for those

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