(upbeat intro music) >> Good afternoon, fellow tech nerds. My name is Savannah Peterson, coming to you from theCube's Remote Studio here in Motown, Detroit, Michigan where we are at KubeCon. John, this is our 12th interview of the day. How are you feeling? >> I'm feeling fresh as the first interview. (Savannah laughs) As always. >> That delivery really implied a level of freshness. >> Let's go! No, this is only Day 1. In three days, reinvent. We go hardcore. These are great events. We get so much great content. The conversations are amazing. The guests are awesome. They're technical, they're smart, and they're making the difference in the future. So, this next segment about Scale MySQL should be awesome. >> I am very excited to introduce our next guest who actually has a Twitter handle that I think most people, at least of my gender in this industry would love to have. She is @ATechGirl. So you can go ahead and tweet her and tell her how great this interview is while we're live. Please welcome Deepthi Sigireddi. Thank you so much for being here with us. >> Thank you for having me. >> You're feeding us in. You've got two talks you're giving while we're here. >> Yes, yes. So tomorrow we will be talking about VTR, myself and one of the other maintainers of Vitess and on Friday we have the Vitess Maintainer Talk. All graduated projects get a maintainer talk. >> Wow, so you are like KubeCon VIP celebrity. >> Well, I hope so. >> Well, you're a maintainer and technical lead, also software engineer at the PlanetScale. But talk about the graduation process where that means to the project and the people involved. >> So Vitess graduated in 2019 and there are strict criteria for graduation and you don't just have to meet the minimum, you sort of have to over perform on the graduation criteria. Some of which are like there must be at least two large production deploys and people from those companies have to go in front of the CNCF committee that approves these things and say that, "Yes, this project is critical to our business." >> A lot of peer review, a lot of deployment success. >> Yes. >> Good consistency in the code. >> Deepthi: Community diversity. >> All that. >> All those things. >> Talk about the importance of this project. What is the top story that people should know about around the project? Why it exists, why it's important, why it's relevant, why it's cool. How would you answer that? >> So MySQL is now 30 years old and yet they are still- >> Makes me feel a little sidebar. (Deepthi laughs) Yeah. >> And yet even though there are many other newer databases, it continues to be used at many of the largest internet scale companies. And some of them, for example, Slack, GitHub, Square, they have grown to a level where they could not have if they had tried to do it with Vanilla MySQL that they started with, and the only reason they are where they are is Vitess. So that is I think the number one thing people should know about Vitess. >> And the origination story on notes say "Came from YouTube." >> Yes. So the way Vitess started was that YouTube was having problems with their MySQL deployment and they got tired of dealing with the site being down. So the founders of Vitess decided that they had to do something about it and they started building Vitess which started as a pretty small, relatively code-based with limited features, and over time they built charting and all of the other things that we have today. >> Well, this is exciting Savannah because we've seen this industry. Like with Facebook, when they started, everyone built their own stuff. MySQL was a great- >> Oh gosh, and everyone wanted to build it their way, reinventing the wheel. >> And MySQL was great. And then as it kind of broke when it grew, it got retrofitted. So, it was constantly being scaled up to the point where now you guys, if I get this right, said, "Hey, we're going to work on this. We're going to make it next-gen." So it's kind of like next-gen MySQL. Almost. >> Yes, yes. I would say that's pretty accurate, yeah. So there are still large companies which run their own MySQL and they have scaled it in their own way, but Vitess happens to be an open source way of scaling MySQL that people can adopt without having to build all of their own tooling around it. >> Speaking of that and growing, you just announced a new version today. >> Yes, yes. >> Tell us about that. >> The focus in this version was to make Vitess easier to use and to deploy. So in the past, there was one glaring gap in Vitess which was that Vitess did not automatically detect and repair MySQL level failures. With this release, we've actually closed that gap. And what that means for people using Vitess is that they will actually spend less time dealing with outages manually, or less human intervention, More automated recovery is what it means. The other thing we've released today is a new web UI. Vitess had a very old web UI, ugly, hard to maintain. Nobody liked it. But it was functional, except we couldn't add anything new to it because it was so old. So, the backend functionality kept advancing but the front end was kind of frozen. Now we have a next generation UI to which in upcoming releases we can add more and more functionality. >> So, it's extensible. They add things in. >> Deepthi: Oh yes, of course. Yeah. >> Awesome. What's the biggest thing that you like about the new situation? Is it more contributors are on board the UI? What's the fresh new impact that's happening in the community? What's getting you excited about with the current project? And the UI's great 'cause usability is important. >> Deepthi: Right. >> Scalability is important. >> I think Vitess solved the scalability problem way early and only now we are really grappling with the usability problem. So the hope and the desire is to make Vitess autopilot so that you reduce human intervention to a minimum once you deploy it. Obviously, you have to go through the process of deploying it. But once you've deployed it, it should just run itself. >> Runs at scale. So, the scale's huge? >> Deepthi: Yes. >> How many contributors are involved in the project? Can you give some numbers? Do you have any handy that you can speak to? >> Right. So, CNCF actually tracks these statistics for all the projects and we consolidated some numbers for the last two full calendar years, 2020 and 2021. We had over 400 contributors and 200 plus of them contributed code and the others contributed documentation issues, website changes, and things like that. So that gives- >> How about downloads? Download's good? >> Oh, okay. So we started publishing the current official Vitess Docker Image in 2018. And by October of 2020, we had about 3.8 million downloads. And by August of 2021, we had 5.2 million. And today, we have had over 10 million downloads- >> Wow! >> Of the main image. >> Starting to see a minute of that hockey stick that we all like to see. Seems like you're very clearly a community-first leader and it seems like that's in the PlanetScale and the test's DNA. Is that how the whole company culture views it? Would you say it's community-first business? >> PlanetScale is very much committed to Vitess as an open source project and to serving the Vitess community. So as part of my role at PlanetScale, some of the things I do are helping new contributors whether they are from PlanetScale or from outside PlanetScale. A number of PlanetScale engineers who don't work full-time on Vitess still contribute bug fixes and features to Vitess. We spend a significant amount of our energy helping users in our community Slack. The releases we do are mainly for the benefit of the community and PlanetScale is making those releases because for Planet Scale... Within PlanetScale, we actually do separate releases versus the public ones. >> One of the things that's coming up here at the show is deploying on Kubernetes. How does that look like? Everyone wants ease of use. Are you guys easy to use? >> Yes, yes. So PlanetScale also open sourced a Kubernetes operator for Vitess that people outside PlanetScale are using to run their production deployments of Vitess. Prior to that, there were Vitess users who actually built their own Kubernetes deployments of Vitess and they are still running those, but new users and new adopters of Vitess tend to use the Kubernetes operator that we are publishing. >> And you guys are the managed service for Vitess for the people that that's the business model for PlanetScale. >> Correct. So PlanetScale has a serverless database on demand which is built on Vitess. So if someone's starting something new and they just need a database, you sign up. It takes 30 seconds to get a database. Connect to it and start doing things with it. Versus if you are a large enterprise and you have a huge database deployment, you can migrate to PlanetScale, import all of your existing data, cut over with minimal downtime and then go, and then PlanetScale manages that. >> And why would they do that? What's the use case for that? Save time new development team or refactoring? >> Save time not being able to hire people with the skills to run it in-house. Not wanting to invest engineering resources in what businesses think is not their core competency. They want to focus on their business value. >> So, this database is a service in their whatever they're doing without adding more costs. >> Right. >> And speed. Okay, cool. How's that going? >> It's going well. >> Any feedback from customers in terms of why that there are any benefit statements you seek popping out? What are the big... What's the big aha when they... When people realize what they have here, what's the aha moment for them? Do they go, "Wow, this is awesome. It's so easy. Push a button. Migrate." Or is it... >> All of those. And people have actually seen cost savings when they've migrated from Amazon RDS to PlanetScale and we have testimonials from people who've said that, "It was so easy to use PlanetScale. Why would we try to do it ourselves?" >> It's the best thing a customer could say, right? We're all about being painkillers and solving some sort of problem. I think that that's a great opportunity to let you show off some of your customers. So, who is receiving this benefit? 'Cause I know PlanetScale specifically is for a certain style of business. >> Hmm. We have a list of customers on the website. >> Savannah: I was going to say you have a really- >> John: She's a software engineer. She's not marketing. >> You did sexy. >> You're doing a great job as much as marketing. >> So the reason I am bringing this up is because it's clear this is a solution for companies like Square, SoundCloud, Etsy, Jordan, and other exciting brands. So when you're talking about companies at scale, these companies are very much at scale, which is awesome. >> Yeah. >> What's next? What do you guys see the future for the project? >> I think we talked about that a little bit already. So, usability is a big thing. We did the new UI. It's not complete, right? Because over the last four years we've built more features into the backend which you can't yet access from the UI. So we want to be able for people to use things like online schema changes which is a big feature of Vitess. Doing schema changes without downtime from the UI. So, schema management from the UI. Vitess has something called VReplication which is the core technology that enables charting. And right now you can from the UI monitor your charting status, but you can't actually start charting from the UI. So more of the administrative functions we want to enable from the UI. >> John: Awesome. >> Last question. What are you personally most excited about this week being here with our wonderful community? >> I always enjoy being at KubeCon. This is my fifth or sixth in-person and I've done a couple of virtual ones. >> Savannah: Awesome. >> Because of the energy, because you get to meet people in person whom previously you've only met in Slack or maybe in a monthly community Zoom calls. We always have people come to our project booth. We have a project booth here for Vitess. People come to the company booth. PlanetScale has a booth. People come to our talks, ask questions. We end up having design discussions, architecture discussions. We get feedback on what is important to the people who show up here. That always informs what we do with the project in future releases. >> Perfect answer. I already mentioned that you can get a hold and in touch with Deepthi through her wonderful Twitter handle. Is there any other website or anything you want to shout out here before I do our close? >> vitess.io. V-I-T-E-S-S dot I-O is the Vitess website and planetscale.com is the PlanetScale website. >> Deepthi Sigireddi, thank you so much for being on the show with us today. John, thanks for keeping me company as always. >> You're welcome. >> And thank all of you for tuning into theCUBE. We will be here in Detroit, Michigan all week live from KubeCon and we hope to see you there. (gentle upbeat music)