Tractable is a podcast for engineering leaders to talk about the hardest technical problems their orgs are tackling — whether that's scaling products to deal with increased demand, racing towards releases, or pivoting the technical stack to better cater to a new landscape of challenges. Each tractable podcast is an in-depth exploration of how the core technology underlying the world's fastest growing companies is built and iterated on. Tractable is hosted by Kshitij Grover, co-founder and CTO at Orb. Orb is the modern pricing platform which solves your billing needs, from seats to consumption and everything in between.
In this episode of Tractable, Orb CTO and Co-founder Kshitij Grover and Gwen Shapira, Co-founder of Nile, explore the cutting-edge world of multi-tenancy and serverless Postgres offerings for modern SaaS applications. This podcast episode delves into Nile's innovative approach to virtual tenant databases, the complexities of managing mixed data blocks, and the challenges of building a database offering tailored to diverse customer needs. Gwen uncovers insights into the decision-making process of building on Postgres and the relentless focus on reliability for ongoing operations.
9/30/24 • 41:22
In this episode of Tractable, Orb CTO Kshitij Grover interviews Dane Knecht, the SVP of Emerging Technology and Incubation at Cloudflare. Together, they explore Cloudflare's innovative approach to infrastructure, AI integration, and developer platform. The conversation spans a discussion on their custom-built infrastructure as well as an upcoming product launch focused on AI, and includes insights into Cloudflare's unique positioning at the forefront of internet software products. Join us as we discuss the complexities of AI, developer platforms, and the future of the Internet.
8/7/24 • 30:59
In this episode of Tractable Podcast, Kshitij Grover interviews Neil Jagdish Patel, the Co-founder and CEO of Axiom, a serverless logging tool used by companies like Prisma, M1 Finance, and Cal.com. Neil talks about Axiom's flexibility and trade-offs, focusing on its efficiency in data ingest, storage, and query execution, also Axiom's potential to become a central tool for events within organizations, its commitment to accessibility, and upcoming product launches. Neil also shares insights on Axiom's approach to optimizing interconnects, query planning, and execution, and its storage architecture utilizing AWS S3; Axiom's product philosophy, support for various data ingest methods, and its emphasis on customer experience.
6/25/24 • 44:59
In this episode of Tractable, Kshitij Grover is joined by Charity Majors, CTO of Honeycomb, to discuss Observability 1.0 and 2.0 and the critical shift from fragmented data sources to a unified source of truth for more efficient debugging and problem-solving. From identifying signs of organizations entrenched in '1.0 thinking' to the need for shorter feedback loops, Charity examines the key factors driving the evolution of observability tools and practices.
6/11/24 • 40:32
On the latest episode of the Tractable podcast, cofounder and CTO of Orb, Kshitij Grover, sits down with Can Duruk, co-founder and CTO of Felt, the world's first collaborative mapping tool. From the technical complexities of map rendering to the broad-reaching impact of their software, this episode highlights how Felt has changed the way we visualize and utilize geographic data. Join us as Can shares the intricate world of mapping, the origins of Felt, and the diverse applications of their platform across industries.
4/15/24 • 37:36
In this episode of the Tractable podcast, Kshitij Grover, the cofounder and CTO of Orb, interviews Eric, the founder and CEO of Modal. They discuss Eric's technical background, his experience building a music recommendation system at Spotify, and his journey to founding Modal. The conversation delves into the challenges faced in the early days of Spotify, the evolution of serverless technology, and the unique approach taken by Modal in simplifying cloud deployments, especially focusing on data, AI, and machine learning workloads.
3/22/24 • 37:59
In this episode of Tractable, Kshitij Grover sits down with special guest Uma Chingunde to explore the intricacies of managing and optimizing complex technical platforms. Uma delves into the critical importance of constant investment in AI to ensure reliability and staying ahead in the ever-evolving landscape of technology. The discussion also dig into the necessity of transparency and communication during critical incidents, emphasizing a blameless approach and the impact of decision-making on key operational changes. Uncover the challenges and strategies involved in running mission-critical workloads, the value of developer experience, and the intricate balance of serving different user segments. Tune in for a deep dive into the world of technical platform management and the thought processes behind significant decisions.
3/12/24 • 43:58
In this episode of Tractable, Orb's podcast with engineering leaders, Kshitij Grover dives deep on Warpstream. Warpstream is a cost-effective Kafka-compatible streaming platform built to be simpler to manage than traditional Kafka solutions, built on top of Richie's previous experiences managing large-scale data systems at both Datadog and Uber. WarpStream is not only architected to save companies inter-AZ costs but also to provide them a stateless system that's easier to manage with often-acceptable tradeoffs on end to end latency. RIchie talks about how Warpstream being in the critical path for other companies' infrastructure influences the GTM strategy and the architecture: serverless pricing is an important mechanic to make Warpstream a foundational building block, and it influences how the team thinks about reliability as a mission-critical part of the offering.
2/23/24 • 41:25
In this episode of the Tractable Podcast, Kshitij Grover, CTO at Orb, interviews David, the CTO of Sentry. Sentry, known for industry leading error and performance monitoring, has become one of the world’s most admired developer tools. Sentry is the tool of choice for over 90,000 companies including developers at Atlassian, GitHub, and Disney+. David shares the origin story of Sentry, tracing its evolution from an opinionated open-source project to a critical part of the modern software stack. Kshitij and David talk about technical challenges, strategic decisions, and leadership styles that have shaped Sentry over the last decade, including its product expansion and adaptability to industry demands. David explores Sentry’s unique approach to growth, with an emphasis of how its open-source model influenced the GTM motion of the company in pursuit of market share. The conversation also touches on the complexities of supporting a diverse range of frameworks and technologies, Sentry’s approach to AI, and the company’s extremely recognizable brand campaigns.Sentry can’t fix this — but maybe David can.
1/27/24 • 46:10
Nikhil Benesch, CTO at Materialize, joins me to discuss the evolution of Materialize from its origins at Cockroach to a production-grade system powering companies like Ramp and General Mills. Nikhil shares the the origin story of Materialize, the progress from Streaming Data Warehouse to Operational Data Warehouse, and the the challenges of offering cloud-native solutions. Additionally, Nikhil explains the trade-offs between freshness, consistency, and responsiveness, and discusses future advancements, including spill-to-disk functionality and expanded data inputs and outputs.
12/5/23 • 54:34
In this episode, Marco, VP of Engineering at Robust Intelligence sketches out his journey in various facets of technology, ranging from autonomous vehicles, virtualization, solid state drives, and Kubernetes. He shares insights on the constantly changing tech trends and how they relate to AI today, emphasizing the necessary balance between tech hype and concrete value. We then take a deep dive into the architecture of Robust Intelligence, discussing the platform’s risk management, data plane and control plane, and the unique security threats posed by large language models.
11/16/23 • 39:41
Josh is the founder and CEO of Airplane, the developer platform for internal tools. We discuss Airplane's latest releases during the company's first Launch Week, including new tools like Airplane Pages and Cloud Workspaces as well as a PostgreSQL offering. Josh shares the dynamic architecture and security challenges his team navigates to ensure seamless integration for both developers and operators. We chat about the role of AI in Airplane products, from enhancing developer build times to potentially revolutionizing operations downstream. Airplane is excited to evolve into a comprehensive control center and operating system for businesses.
11/2/23 • 42:56
Robbie Walzer, VP of Engineering at SingleStore, talks through SingleStore's journey and its evolution as a distributed SQL database. We discuss the technical architecture and optimizations of SingleStore, formerly MemSQL, and how it handles both transactional and analytical workloads simultaneously. Robbie sheds light on the challenges associated with characterizing performance attributes of databases, the growing relevance of semantic search, and the importance of testing for ensuring database reliability and correctness. He also shares views on the future trajectory of the database industry.
10/2/23 • 41:19
In this episode, I chat with Julianna, co-founder and CTO of Stytch, a platform for authentication and identity management. Julianna shares her journey from studying computer science at Stanford to working at Plaid and co-founding Stytch. She discusses the challenges in securing customer data and scaling a mission critical platform, especially across a large range of client environments. Julianna also highlights the key role of comprehensive documentation to building a developer product and maintaining balance between security and ease of use. The result is an identify platform that powers companies from Zapier to Checkr.
9/2/23 • 34:23
