This startup is simplifying the way companies build cloud-native applications

In 2007, when social media was just taking off, Karthik Ranganathan was working as a technical lead at Facebook. At the time, Ranganathan was part of the team behind Apache Cassandra, a first-of-its-kind database management system originally developed for Facebook’s inbox search function.

They were trying to use Cassandra to change how Facebook managed its databases.

“The data was split across many MySQL databases that had to be accessed manually through multiple nodes,” he recalls. “It was very complicated, especially when you’re trying to build applications that are constantly running without incurring any downtime.”

At the time, there wasn’t a tool that enabled companies to handle large amounts of data stored in disparate nodes. This was a big problem for Facebook, which was already on track to become a major social media platform with millions of users.

Cassandra would later form the foundation for Apache HBase, a similar but more consistent distributed database designed for a wider range of applications.

But the lessons from the experience were clear: Ranganathan and his team saw just how hungry the industry was for innovative future-forward databases.

With this vision in mind, Ranganathan teamed up with a few of his Facebook colleagues and founded Yugabyte in 2016, with the aim of providing a distributed database designed to simplify the development of cloud-native applications.

Something old, something new

At the heart of Yugabyte’s solution is YugabyteDB, a distributed Structured Query Language (SQL) database born in and for the cloud. Firms can choose how they experience YugabyteDB by using either YugabyteDB Managed or YugabyteDB Anywhere. The former is a fully managed version of the product – its “database as a service” offering – while the latter is a self-managed database that helps companies deploy YugabyteDB at scale.

In the firm’s early days, its solutions faced some pushback. Many developers were reluctant to give up familiar tools, even though these tools were difficult to scale and especially vulnerable to disruptions, given the increasing prevalence of cloud computing at the time.

To reassure developers wary of yet another solution they didn’t understand, YugabyteDB was designed to duplicate many of the functionalities of Postgres, a popular open-source relational database management system.

“We decided to maintain all the familiar, rich, and powerful capabilities of existing databases like the Postgres API and add on a bunch of features,” Ranganathan explains. “With YugabyteDB, firms’ data is replicable, always available, and distributed.”

Taking cues from Postgres also ensured that onboarding was extremely easy for developers.

 

A difficult business case

However, making the case for Yugabyte’s never-before-seen technology was a struggle – especially when it came to business executives.

“Enterprise people weren’t even sure if transactional databases would make it to the cloud,” Ranganathan says, referring to the systems critical to running applications, like billing systems, user profiles, and logins.

YugabyteDB was also “deceptively simple,” which made marketing the product difficult due to pre-existing notions about what a database could or should be, he adds.

“We were hybridising the tool – it could run on anything, across multiple or single nodes – and pushing boundaries but no one understood where we were,” he shares.

To solve this marketing challenge, the company riffed on existing concepts that clients understood, defining its product as a “distributed SQL database.”

Knowing that its solution was ahead of the industry and that transactional applications would eventually be cloud-based and more customer friendly, Yugabyte made its product widely available to users. The firm rolled out both self-managed and fully managed versions – the former would be open-source so developers could see for themselves how beneficial it could be.

In doing so, Yugabyte built its own audience, allowing the product to speak for itself. The company also grasped at every opportunity, working mostly with smaller but forward-thinking companies that were willing to take a bet on them.

Getting into action

One such company was Xignite, which provides financial information such as market data, stock values, and company profiles to a roster of around 700 customers, including major names like Blackrock and Robinhood.

When Xignite first came to Yugabyte, the former was struggling to handle a seemingly unmanageable flood of data, comprising more than 250 data sources and 12 billion API calls per day, containing sensitive information that needed to be timely, consistent, and accurate. Xignite wanted to scale up its database management, but doing so with older tech was very difficult and expensive.

Yugabyte took on the project of fully managing four of Xignite’s data clusters. As YugabyteDB was entirely cloud native, Xignite could store more data without incurring significant costs or load times.

As a result, the firm was not only able to serve its huge client base with accurate, real-time data, but also saved 50% of what they would have otherwise spent on a different service.

“We brought value to them, but their value to us was they really helped us make sure we had the initial set of features like our alerts, monitoring, encryption, and other security capabilities in place to really harden our product,” Ranganathan shares.

Yugabyte’s long game

Yugabyte has grown tremendously since its early days – its headcount has grown 10x in the last two years, and it has a significant user base under its belt. It counts some major companies among its clients, including US retail giant Kroger.

Now, the firm is looking toward the future. Currently, database modernisation is defined as existing services being moved onto the cloud, but Ranganathan predicts that this will change as customers pursue cloud-native products.

“This isn’t just about modernising your application, but modernising your entire approach to databases,” he says.

Another area with great potential for Yugabyte is changing how companies approach the scale of their databases.

Yugabyte is thinking through these solutions with a different perspective of time and scale. To illustrate the firm’s long-term vision, Ranganthan says that the company was named after “yuga,” the Sanskrit word for an epoch or eon.

“Everyone talks about data in terms of size, but what about time?” he says. “How do you make data last forever? You have to think about how we can move from the old to the new without disrupting anything. That’s the true challenge.”