Sugu Sougoumarane, co-creator of Vitess and co-founder of PlanetScale, joins me to talk about his time scaling YouTube’s database infrastructure, building Vitess, and his latest project bringing sharding to Postgres with Multigres.
This was a fun conversation with technical deep-dives, lessons from building distributed systems, and why he’s joining Supabase to tackle this next big challenge.
Sugu’s Vitess videos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yOjF7qhmyY&list=PLA9CMdLbfL5zHg3oapO0HvtPfVx6_iJy6
The big announcement:
https://supabase.com/blog/multigres-vitess-for-postgres
Database School:
https://databaseschool.com
Follow Sugu:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ssougou
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sougou
Follow Aaron:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/aarondfrancis
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aarondfrancis
Website: https://aaronfrancis.com - find articles, podcasts, courses, and more.
Chapters:
00:00 - Intro
1:38 - The birth of Vitess at YouTube
3:19 - The spreadsheet that started it all
6:17 - Intelligent query parsing and connection pooling
9:46 - Preventing outages with query limits
13:42 - Growing Vitess beyond a connection pooler
16:01 - Choosing Go for Vitess
20:00 - The life of a query in Vitess
23:12 - How sharding worked at YouTube
26:03 - Hiding the keyspace ID from applications
33:02 - How Vitess evolved to hide complexity
36:05 - Founding PlanetScale & maintaining Vitess solo
39:22 - Sabbatical, rediscovering empathy, and volunteering
42:08 - The itch to bring Vitess to Postgres
44:50 - Why Multigres focuses on compatibility and usability
49:00 - The Postgres codebase vs. MySQL codebase
52:06 - Joining Supabase & building the Multigres team
54:20 - Starting Multigres from scratch with lessons from Vitess
57:02 - MVP goals for Multigres
1:01:02 - Integration with Supabase & database branching
1:05:21 - Sugu’s dream for Multigres
1:09:05 - Small teams, hiring, and open positions
1:11:07 - Community response to Multigres announcement
1:12:31 - Where to find Sugu
