Summary

Data persistence is one of the most challenging aspects of computer systems. In the era of the cloud most developers rely on hosted services to manage their databases, but what if you are a cloud service? In this episode Vignesh Ravichandran explains how his team at Cloudflare provides PostgreSQL as a service to their developers for low latency and high uptime services at global scale. This is an interesting and insightful look at pragmatic engineering for reliability and scale.

Announcements

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management
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Your host is Tobias Macey and today I'm interviewing Vignesh Ravichandran about building an internal database as a service platform at Cloudflare

Interview

Introduction
How did you get involved in the area of data management?
Can you start by describing the different database workloads that you have at Cloudflare?
- What are the different methods that you have used for managing database instances?
What are the requirements and constraints that you had to account for in designing your current system?
Why Postgres?
optimizations for Postgres
- simplification from not supporting multiple engines
limitations in postgres that make multi-tenancy challenging
scale of operation (data volume, request rate
What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen your DBaaS used?
What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on your internal database platform?
When is an internal database as a service the wrong choice?
What do you have planned for the future of Postgres hosting at Cloudflare?

Contact Info

Parting Question

From your perspective, what is the biggest gap in the tooling or technology for data management today?

Closing Announcements

Thank you for listening! Don't forget to check out our other shows. Podcast.__init__ covers the Python language, its community, and the innovative ways it is being used. The Machine Learning Podcast helps you go from idea to production with machine learning.
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The intro and outro music is from The Hug by The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA

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