Deepthi Sigireddi is a Software Engineer at PlanetScale where she focuses on open source development on the Vitess project. Vitess is a distributed management system for MySQL compatible databases. She is a 20 year industry veteran who still loves to write code. Deepthi is active in the Vitess community and has spoken about Vitess at various conferences.
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She will describe open sourcing decisions that went into building PlanetScaleDB (built on Vitess) from an engineering & business perspective
To Open Source or Not? Answering this question with PlanetScale. — 00:00
Introduction to Deepthi and PlanetScale, including founding, funding, and Vitess — 00:22
Vitess + PlanetScaleDB, and Vitess’s journey from YouTube to CNCF — 1:28
The Vitess enterprise user community — 2:23
Vitess architecture and explanation. “What Vitess can do is to hide the complexity of having multiple databases behind the scenes, and present a unified view to the application.” — 2:40
“We have built a service of cloud servers.” Explaining the PlanetScaleDB service — 4:44
Internal view of PlanetScaleDB system, from Vitess to PSDB — 6:44
“Why did we even decide to open-source anything at all?” Deepthi walks through PlanetScale’s OSS decision framework. — 8:17
“Given that we were building something better than anything else available, and there was a desire and need expressed by the community for something like this, we started thinking about whether we should open-source it. Ultimately, we decided yes we should open-source it, as open-sourcing it will have its own benefits.” — 9:48
After deciding to open-source, Deepthi details subsequent decisions company had to make - including features, ownership, and licensing. “Anything that effects an application, talking to Vitess components, all the way to MySQL and back, should always be open-source. That’s one of the guidelines we came up with.” — 10:23
Ultimately, PlanetScale opted to keep ownership of project, to give flexibility of adding to the project and change licensing in the future. — 11:40
Apache 2.0 was chosen because that was the most popular open-source license. — 12:00
Deepthi explains what PlanetScale ultimately open-sourced and the Vitess operator. — 12:15
Deepthi details the enterprise, proprietary version of PSDB, and process of splitting tech into a Vitess operator and enterprise feature overlay. “New features go into PlanetScale Operator first, and then into open-source if it makes sense.” — 13:13
Enterprise feature examples: automation of periodic backups, automated cluster management features, automated rolling upgrades, multi-region clusters — 14:32
Pros and Cons of decision to open source — 16:20
PlanetScale’s commitment to open source, as founders and maintainers of Vitess, and in the larger OSS ecosystem —18:08
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