In this episode I discuss Twisp's journey with Mike Parsons, CTO and Co-Founder of Twisp. We have discussed how they ended up building a cloud native distributed ledger database on top of DynamoDB, why they chose DynamoDB? what were the challenges they faced and many highly technical and very interesting topics.

Chapters:

00:00 Introduction - Twisp - CTO and Co-Founder Mike Parsons

03:01 What do we mean by a Distributed Ledger Database?

07:13 Is it similar to Blockchain?

08:32 Challenges faced with Relational Database setup

19:39 Why DynamoDB was the right choice?

24:40 What was the scale you were building for?

26:05 Who uses a Ledger database?

29:30 What are the basic primtives in a ledger database?

33:55 Is every primitive Immutable? How is it stored?

38:07 Impact of Immutability on Data storage

41:33 How does idempotency work in Twisp?

44:53 How did you provide ACID guarantees on top of DynamoDB?

52:30 How do you ensure correctness?

57:13 Interesting real world usecases where Twisp is used.

01:02:33 Are you planning to build even higher level primitives?

References:

Clocks: https://cse.buffalo.edu/tech-reports/... and http://rystsov.info/2018/10/01/tso.html

TicToc: https://people.csail.mit.edu/sanchez/...

Hekaton Paper: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/resea...

Hermitage Test suite: https://github.com/ept/hermitage

Online Async Schema Change in F1 : https://static.googleusercontent.com/...

Designing Data intensive Applications: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/...

P Programming language: https://github.com/p-org/P

Twisp: https://www.twisp.com/

AWS Dynamo DB: https://aws.amazon.com/pm/dynamodb/?t...

Connect with Mike:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/parsnips/

Follow me:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/thegeeknarrator

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kaivalyaa...

Watch other playlists:

Databases:    • Modern Databases  

Distributed systems:    • Distributed Systems  

Software Engineering:    • Software Engineering  

Sofk skills:    • Soft Skills  

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Cheers,

The GeekNarrator