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Jon Christensen and Rich Staats learn about Chris Hickman’s first venture-backed startup (circa 1998) and its goal to build a database for Internet-scale applications. His story highlights what software is all about – history repeating itself because technology/software is meant to solve problems via new tools, techniques, and bigger challenges at bigger scales.
Some of the highlights of the show include:
- 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
Links and Resources
AWS re:Invent 2018 – Keynote with Werner Vogels
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