SPRING 2021 › REDISCOVER MAGAZINE 1 ISSUE II SPRING 2021 TABLE OF CONTENTS 2 Editor’s Note By Fredric Paul 4 Discoveries News and trends in 9 CLOUD data-driven business TRUTHS and technology 6 Founders’ Forum: That no one talks about A New Way to Sell By Joe Mullich Software in the Cloud By Ofer Bengal (Redis Labs) 7 Founders’ Forum: The Rise of the Real- Time Data Platform By Yiftach Shoolman 12 (Redis Labs) 8 Analyst Angle: 5 Cloud Trends to Watch By Sanjeev Mohan Microservices Hot Seat: Q&A with (Gartner) and the Cloud: It’s Kelsey Hightower Complicated By Fredric Paul By Charles Babcock The high-profile Google 10 Marketing Matters: 20 24 Bottom Up and Inside the complex, symbiotic open source advocate on Top Down Sales: relationship between the future of the cloud. Growth, Scale, microservices and the cloud. and Predictability By Mike Anand (Redis Labs) Rediscovered in A Brief History of 11 Notes From the Field Databases CTO: Learning from the Cloud the Pandemic to By David Needle By Haley Kim Succeed Beyond It 30 How the cloud helped 34 A visual timeline of By Allen Terleto us rediscover industries, database development. (Redis Labs) technologies, and products. 44 Rediscovering Redis Labs: The Next Generation Get to know Redis Meet the Open The Time Has Come Labs’ youngest Source Redis for Real-Time Retail team members Core Team By Aaron Sun By Haley Kim 36 By Fredric Paul & Haley Kim 40 What it takes to create A discussion with the five an instant, seamless, 48 Key-Value: The “Real” people most responsible for omnichannel retail Meaning of Common the future of OSS Redis. experience. Cloud Terms ISSUE II › REDISCOVER MAGAZINE 1 Issue II EDITOR’S NOTE Publisher Mike Anand Editor-in-Chief Now Is the Time to Rediscover the Cloud Fredric Paul hen we decided to focus the second issue of Managing Editor Rusty Weston Rediscover Magazine on the cloud, it seemed like a no brainer. Way back in early 2020, Associate Editor the cloud was already on a tear, enjoying Haley Kim W explosive growth as it upended traditional enterprise Art Director technology with the promise of unmatched business agility Estella Xian and flexibility, speeding online products and services to market, freeing development teams to create game-changing innovations and great digital Design Consultant customer experiences instead of worrying about plumbing. Talia Trackim And then COVID-19 hit. Contributing Writers Suddenly, yet another “Year of the Cloud” turned into THE year of the cloud. Mike Anand As knowledge workers transitioned to working remotely and shoppers Charles Babcock turned to delivery services and curbside pickup, the transformational impact Ofer Bengal of cloud computing shifted from the future to the present. Companies Sanjeev Mohan that had embraced the cloud were better able to cope with these dramatic Joe Mullich developments, while everyone else raced to catch up. David Needle It’s not so much that the global pandemic changed the role of the Yiftach Shoolman cloud or the technology itself, but that these external forces accelerated and Aaron Sun intensified the cloud’s ascendance. Now it’s more essential than ever that Allen Terleto business and technology leaders possess a clear-eyed understanding of Doug Tidwell what the cloud is, how it works, and what it can and can’t do. This issue is packed with insights and intelligence designed to help you Redis Labs rediscover how the cloud can transform your organization, give you context on the concepts and technologies behind today’s most important cloud CEO & Co-Founder technologies, and prepare for a cloud-driven future. In “9 Cloud Truths (That Ofer Bengal Nobody Talks About),” for example, you’ll learn the real story about today’s cloud challenges and opportunities (page 12). Google Cloud guru Kelsey CTO & Co-Founder Hightower, meanwhile, shares his insights on what really matters in the Yiftach Shoolman cloud (page 24), and Gartner Analyst Sanjeev Mohan offers some well-informed CRO & GM North America cloud predictions (page 8). And that’s just scratching the surface. Jason Forget Want to learn more about Redis Labs in the cloud? Check out RedisLabs. Chief Business Development Officer com/cloud. If you’re looking for more about the power of rediscovery— Taimur Rahid including free access to the premiere issue of Rediscover Magazine—visit https://redislabs.com/rediscover-magazine/. Chief Financial Officer Rafael Torres Thank you! Chief R&D Officer Itai Raz Fredric “The Freditor” Paul Editor-in-Chief VP Marketing Mike Anand A PUBLICATION FROM VP Human Resources Adi Stern Rediscover Magazine © 2021 Redis Labs, Inc. All rights reserved. Redis Labs is a trademark of Redis Labs, Inc., registered in the United States and other countries. All other brand names mentioned herein are for identification purposes only and may be the trademarks of their respective holder(s). Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this magazine are those of the respective authors, and not necessarily those of Redis Labs, Inc. or any of its other employees or affiliates. Redis Labs has not endorsed any of the content contained herein. Questions, comments, or concerns for the Rediscover Magazine editorial team? Send an email to [email protected] Interested in Redis, Redis Enterprise, or Redis Labs? Visit RedisLabs.com or call (415) 930-9666 2 redislabs.com/rediscover-magazine AD GOES HERE SPRING 2021 › REDISCOVER MAGAZINE 5 DISCOVERIES RETAIL CLOSES THE SALE ON DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION What industry is leading the charge to the IT systems of the future, and who’s falling behind? According to an exclusive Redis Labs survey of more than 500 AWS re:Invent attendees, retail is closing the sale when THE CLOUD it comes to digital transformation, while education appears to be a slow learner. ABOVE THE Among many other things, we asked respondents about their strategies for the cloud, Kubernetes, microservices, and NoSQL databases. Then we CLOUDS assigned numeric values to their descriptions of their strategies and calculated a Digital Transformation It turns out there’s a need for computational and Index (DTI). The index helps assess how far along an communications power in outer space—particularly organization is on its digital transformation journey. on the International Space Station. Sure, processing scientific workloads on a supercomputing platform The full results will be released orbiting 254 miles above the ground makes operational sense, but nothing comes easily or inexpensively in soon, but here are some spoilers: space. NASA wants to use cloud computing for data collection, but among many other things must contend • Across all industries, cloud strategies are the most with the presence of radiation, which is like Kryptonite for advanced with a DTI of 3.64, while NoSQL came in computer processing outside the atmosphere unless last at 2.45. (The DTI ranges from 5 down to 0—or devices are specially hardened. most to least transformational.) Hardships aside, the IEEE recently noted that cloud • As noted, retail topped the list of industries with a technology is crucial for space exploration, because DTI of 3.49, while education sat in the back of the astronauts and robots rely on readily available information class at 2.20. to tip the scales between success and failure of a mission. • You might think the tech industry would be a leader, But exploration isn’t the only reason that cloud but it came in fifth with a DTI of 3.29. providers are scrambling to launch space clouds. • Finance scored even lower than tech (3.07), perhaps Microsoft’s Azure Space cloud, for example, intends because most banks use highly structured data to “supply a multi-orbit, multi-band, multi-vendor, and need ACID transactions, so they’re less likely to cloud-enabled capability” to help control a network quickly shed their reliance on relational database. of communications satellites. For its part, AWS Aerospace and Satellite Solutions foresee helping IoT That’s only a small sample of the wisdom revealed communications companies blanket low-space orbit with in the survey. The report also shows how different thousands of sensor-equipped satellites to provide low- industries make their database choices (another latency internet and high-resolution Earth observation. spoiler: cost is important), the popularity of putting Meanwhile, IBM projects that edge computing may a cache in front of a relational database, and which become prevalent in orbit because it saves time and programming languages they use to build database energy to process data in space rather than transmit it applications. Keep an eye out for the complete survey back and forth to earth. Big Blue even sees potential for results and analysis.—Doug Tidwell rolling out blockchain in space!—Rusty Weston 4 redislabs.com/rediscover-magazine THE CLOUD VS. THE EDGE? In the near corner, wearing white, we present our city streets, and even autonomous vehicles. returning champion, the Cloud. According to Research and While cloud vs. the edge sounds like a blockbuster Markets, the cloud is expected to grow 17.5% a year to reach Marvel franchise, in real life they’re more like shoes $832 billion by 2025. and jackets vying to be your favorite apparel. Nearly In the far corner, clad in neon-red, meet our everything processed at the edge is destined for the challenger, the Edge, much smaller and younger but cloud, and almost everything else now in data centers is growing twice as fast: 34% a year headed to a modest headed there too. So what seems like a sharp distinction $15.7 billion in 2025, per Markets and Markets. So is this a today is likely to blur over time as new tools emerge to fair fight for enterprise architecture supremacy? help enterprises seamlessly manage workloads and data Like the cloud, edge computing can sound a bit on either platform.—Rusty Weston vague, but it’s where you crunch data as close as possible to where it’s created—when there’s no time to backhaul it to the cloud or a data center.