Summary
Welcome to Mobycast! This is the second episode that we’re re-releasing from back when we told Chris’s personal story of starting Viathan, which was a software startup built to create one of the first internet scale databases. You’ll get to see how his work in the early 2000’s/late 90’s was instrumental to what later became the databases that we count on today. Anyway, the reason that you should listen to this is not because it’s a fun story but because we’re asking you to trust us here at Mobycast when we tell you what we think is the best way to do distributed systems and cloud-native development, and what better way to learn to trust us than to listen to how Chris got started in this whole world…
Show Notes
- Why Chris left Microsoft and how much it cost him; yet, he has no regrets
- Chris’s concept addressed how to build a scalable database layer; how to partition, chart, and cluster; and how to make it highly available and a completely scale-out architecture
- Chris couldn’t use the code he had created for it while at Microsoft; but from that, he learned what he wouldn’t do again
- Chris let the file system be the database at Microsoft, and the project was named, Internet File Store (IFS); it used backend code and was similar to S3
- Chris named his startup Viathan; had to do copyright, trademark, and domain name searches
- Data for the Microsoft project could be stored in files/XML documents; Viathan took a different approach and used relational databases instead of a file system
- Companies experienced problems at the beginning of the Internet; rest of ecosystem wasn’t developed and there weren’t enough people needing Internet solutions yet
- Viathan went through several iterations that led to patents being issued and being considered as Prior art
- Viathan’s technology couldn’t just be plugged in and turned on, applications had to be modified – a tough sell
- Chris did groundbreaking work for what would become DynamoDB
What is Mobycast?
A Podcast About Cloud Native Software Development, AWS, and Distributed Systems