Episode #36: The Cloud Database Landscape with Suphatra Rufo

About Suphatra Rufo

Suphatra started her career at NPR and PBS stations around the country, and quickly found her way into technology. She worked on social good initiatives like Microsoft’s Imagine Cup, a competition for young inventors; We Day, working with Selena Gomez to advocate for more young women to learn how to code; and TEALS, a program that places industry engineers in high school classrooms to teach computer science.

She has deep product experience and led the effort to create a nonprofit SKU for Office 365 and Azure and bring cloud computing as an upsell to the social sector to 93+ markets and realize a new revenue stream for Microsoft. She was part of the original team that built Microsoft Teams and saw the product from Preview to GA, all the way to v2. She worked at the forefront of cloud computing at Amazon Web Services, managing their $6B database category's developer advocacy and customer storytelling efforts. Today, she heads up solutions marketing at Couchbase, a late-stage VC-backed cloud database startup in Silicon Valley valued at nearly half a billion dollars that develops open-source, NoSQL, multi-model, document-oriented and key value databases.

• Twitter: @skprufo
• Couchbase: couchbase.com

Transcript:

Jeremy: Hi, everyone. I'm Jeremy Daly and you're listening to Serverless Chats. This week I'm chatting with Suphatra Rufo. Hi, Suphatra. Thanks for joining me.

Suphatra: Hey, Jeremy. Thanks for having me.

Jeremy: You recently became the head of solutions marketing at Couchbase, so why don't you tell the listeners a little bit about yourself and what Couchbase does?

Suphatra: Hi, I'm Suphatra. I'm head of solutions marketing at Couchbase, which is a small start-up in Silicon Valley that develops open source NoSQL multi-model, document oriented and key value databases. We've raised $155 million in funding and we're valued at nearly half a billion dollars. As head of solutions marketing at Couchbase, I create the company's market strategy, sales plays across different industries and solutions, and I handle all of our compete scenarios. In my typical day to day, I'm usually looking at complex technical and business challenges and trying to diagnose how we can create solutions around that, and working with our engineering team to influence product road maps so that our solutions can be integrated in features and helping our business teams determine our next go-to-market investment areas.

Jeremy: Awesome. All right. You have a ton of experience and you have a very impressive resume on marketing cloud databases... Is maybe a good way to say it. I'd love to get some insight from you into how companies, especially enterprises, are looking at migrating data to the cloud and moving away from maybe more traditional on-prem type installations. I guess maybe the best place to start is, I think most people know what relational databases are, that's a pretty common thing. And I think people have a sense of what NoSQL is, people might be familiar with DynamoDB, MongoDB, Cassandra, those sort of things. But maybe you could just give us a little bit of background on what modern NoSQL looks like.

Suphatra: Yeah, yeah, like NoSQL 2.0, but I'll just start from the very beginning too, because I think a lot of people are confused NoSQL still, which is funny because it's been around for almost a decade at this point, but NoSQL is essentially a different kind of database that doesn't rows and columns. One good example is if you think about an application like Snapchat, on New Year's Eve, millions of people want to use Snapchat at the exact same time. So 11:59 PM, millions of people get on their phone to use Snapchat because they want to capture the exact same picture at that exact moment. So Snapchat, as an application, has to be built in a way to accommodate for a very sudden and huge surge in performance for a very brief moment of time, and then scale right back down... Because once people take that picture of them kissing their loved one when the bell rings, or the ball drops, I should say, then they stop using Snapchat, so then that goes straight down.

What NoSQL databases are great for is they can handle those types of really heavy spikes because they can scale up and down really easily because they aren't constrained by rows and columns like a typical relational database. That's what the NoSQL databases really offer. Since NoSQL databases were invented a decade ago, they've really branched out to lots of different types of NoSQL. Now you have document databases, you have adjacent documents, key value databases... Couchbase is cool because they do both of those things. When I was at AWS, I helped with stories about DynamoDB, which is specifically just key value database, which is also really strong database as well.

Jeremy: The thing that's interesting about NoSQL, and we're hearing more and more about it, there's a lot of different companies that are offering solutions for it. And more importantly, I think there are companies that are starting to adopt... And specifically for the workloads like you talked about, that New Year's Eve... Billions of records or billions of transactions in a very, very short amount of time, but is this something that you're seeing companies, maybe not just your start-ups and your Snapchats, but you're seeing other companies start to adopt?

Suphatra: Yeah, yeah. I think the way that consumers behave, the retail industry is a good example. You probably didn't know that Sears, Kmart, Barneys New York, Party City, I can name a dozen more retailers that just last year, either completely closed down or had to significantly reduce their number of stores, just last year. It's because retail isn't done the same way anymore. Those spikes are now a common part of life and people are having a hard time figuring out how to handle it. Tesco, which is the largest grocery chain store, I'm not sure in America or in the world, I'll have to check that... But they, in 2014, crashed on Black Friday because they couldn't handle the spike in the demands they were getting online. So they lost an entire day of business on Black Friday because they couldn't handle that workload. And then the year later, they went on a NoSQL database and now they can handle that load.

I think what people are seeing is that normal day to day business operations are fundamentally different. For example, the fashion industry used to have only four clothing seasons. Your mother probably remembers buying a new outfit every season... So winter, spring, summer, and fall. And so women's clothiers would go and create new clothes four times a year. Now the fashion industry has 52 seasons, so every week is a different season of women's clothing, which means there's a spike every week for every launch of every new clothing line. So that's another big database problem that's now just becoming a regular part of life. A decade after NoSQL databases are invented, it's really not a new invention anymore. Now this is just the way of business.

Jeremy: Wow. I can't imagine buying something new every week. I buy a new hoodie maybe once a year or twice a year or something like that. That's the extent of my fashion choices. I think that's really interesting. I think that's where everything is moving, is that just you have to become global now, right? You have to be able to handle these workloads that are just gigantic, and obviously there's some major players in this space. We have AWS and we know of things like DynamoDB and now some of the managed services...