Sugu Sougoumarane, co-creator of Vitess and co-founder of PlanetScale, joins me to talk about his time scaling YouTube’s database infrastructure, building Vitess, and his latest project bringing sharding to Postgres with Multigres.

This was a fun conversation with technical deep-dives, lessons from building distributed systems, and why he’s joining Supabase to tackle this next big challenge.

Sugu’s Vitess videos:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yOjF7qhmyY&list=PLA9CMdLbfL5zHg3oapO0HvtPfVx6_iJy6

The big announcement:

https://supabase.com/blog/multigres-vitess-for-postgres

Database School:

https://databaseschool.com

Follow Sugu:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/ssougou

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sougou

Follow Aaron:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/aarondfrancis

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aarondfrancis

Website: https://aaronfrancis.com - find articles, podcasts, courses, and more.

Chapters:

00:00 - Intro

1:38 - The birth of Vitess at YouTube

3:19 - The spreadsheet that started it all

6:17 - Intelligent query parsing and connection pooling

9:46 - Preventing outages with query limits

13:42 - Growing Vitess beyond a connection pooler

16:01 - Choosing Go for Vitess

20:00 - The life of a query in Vitess

23:12 - How sharding worked at YouTube

26:03 - Hiding the keyspace ID from applications

33:02 - How Vitess evolved to hide complexity

36:05 - Founding PlanetScale & maintaining Vitess solo

39:22 - Sabbatical, rediscovering empathy, and volunteering

42:08 - The itch to bring Vitess to Postgres

44:50 - Why Multigres focuses on compatibility and usability

49:00 - The Postgres codebase vs. MySQL codebase

52:06 - Joining Supabase & building the Multigres team

54:20 - Starting Multigres from scratch with lessons from Vitess

57:02 - MVP goals for Multigres

1:01:02 - Integration with Supabase & database branching

1:05:21 - Sugu’s dream for Multigres

1:09:05 - Small teams, hiring, and open positions

1:11:07 - Community response to Multigres announcement

1:12:31 - Where to find Sugu