SQL Database Service Added to Fermyon Cloud – Matt Butcher, Fermyon

This is Techstrong tv. Hey everyone, welcome back here, the Techstrong tv. You know, I'm joined, uh, for this next segment segment by a good friend of mine.

He's, he's been on Techstrong with us before. He's been with us live at CubeCon. I I assume you're gonna be live in CubeCon in Chicago with us too, Matt.

Oh, yeah. Yep. Very cool.

Um, he's Matt Butcher. He's co-founder, c e o of Ferion. Is that right?

I always mispronounce it. You, You're, you're gonna try and make me sing it again, aren't you? Alright, fine.

Yeah. Ferion just like the Aha song. Take me on.

Fur Me On. So, look, Matt's so, you know, beyond Fur Fer me on Matt. Matt was actually the inventor of the C N C F animals.

Yep. Right. He put it in a, a book for his daughter and he sings the fair, the, the songs.

And, but Matt's also probably one of the biggest, uh, ambassadors evangelist for the whole web assembly Wasm market as well. Yep. Of which for me, on's one of the leaders in there.

So, Matt, it's great to have you back on Techstrong tv. I hope you've been well. Yes, yes.

Has been a, been a wonderful summer and now we're kind of heading into fall and I'm ready for some cooler temperatures at this point. I live in South Florida. You don't have to talk, you don't have to switch my, actually, I was in, I was in San Francisco this past week for Google Next Uhhuh, and it was, the weather was just late, late, uh, high sixties, low seventies, no humidity, no clouds.

It was, I wore a jacket. I remember what the jacket looked like. It was great.

But this is a busy week for you guys too, over it. For, for, for me on in that you have not one, but two conferences going on. Tell us about 'em.

Yeah, we're doing a little bit of the Divide and conquer thing. Uh, first up we got SI O Navigate, uh, and that's the fifth and sixth. And, uh, that one's really exciting, exciting for me.

It'll be my first time going. That's over in London. Uh, uh, a lot of infrastructure talks.

I think, I think there are probably five or six web assembly talks in this two day conference. So it's sort of like a mini web assembly conference going on inside of SIBO Navigate. And then of course, C N C F is throwing the first Wasm Con, uh, or Linux Foundation is throwing the first Wasm Con, and that's in this Seattle area and Bellevue, Washington.

Uh, and that's coming up on, on Wednesday and Thursday, and then on Friday after that, I think they've even got, uh, a component model hack day going on. So, and that, I mean, the, the, the speaker list for that is the variable who's who of web assembly developers, you know, the, the people who have been in it from day one. It's, that one is just gonna be absolutely awesome.

Very cool. So, I, I'm gonna imagine the wasm one. You could probably get to off C N C F or off of Linux.

Yep. Yeah. Foundation.

Yeah. Yep. Yeah, wasm Con is the name of it.

Uh, it's pretty easy to, uh, actually the first thing that comes back in the search results too. com and find it and find it right there on their front page. Excellent.

Spell CVO for us. C I V o. Cool.

Just wanna make it easy for people that Oh, oh yeah. Com. Alright, now that we've got that out of the way though, wanted to talk to you today a little bit about some recent announcement from Furion around, uh, a NoOps database for developers building serverless apps, right?

So, building apps with using web assembly and now a no ops database. Tell us the deal here. I think, you know, really when we, when we were talking at KubeCon, I, I told you, you know what the, the key story that we were trying to tell the key, uh, user story for all of 2022 and into 2023 was as a developer, I can go from blinking cursor to a deployed application in two minutes or less.

This idea that the, that if we could just get a developer going, you know, and, and, and get them feeling productive, like two minutes or less, the the endorphin rush you get from that is just so great. And, and then you can really get going right into that creative space where you're trying to develop code. You're not spending time doing the boilerplate stuff that people really resent.

Well, when we, you know, once we kind of felt like we had really nailed down that story, uh, we started talking about, well, what are the other things that are frustrating to us as developers, right? What, what are, what are things that we don't like doing? And one of them was getting your whole database environment set up.

You know, the vast majority of app of of server side applications out there. Use a database for something or other. And, and so we were going, all right, so, you know, the typical, the typical developer experience is like this nine step process that starts with, I gotta pick a database and install it locally so I can start writing code locally and test it locally.

Then I have to configure this thing, and I'm creating accounts even though there's only one user. And you go through this and it's like an exhausting litany of tasks that the developer has to do all the way through, you know, pushing out to production and sending something up there. And we went, what if we could kind of take that same approach that we've been taking in the core workflow and say, it should just be super easy, like, so easy that the only thing the developer needs to do is say, yes, I want a database.

And the database is just supplied for the user. Uh, you know, it's pre-provisioned locally, so they can do all their local development, and then when they do that spin deploy and push it out, defer on cloud, they've automatically got a database out there. Uh, the database migration is easy and everything is just kind of up and running.

And then, you know, even more importantly than that, uh, there are no day two ups, right? It's not the case that once you've got your application out there, then suddenly you're on the hook for managing things over and over, you know, doing the upgrades, uh, redoing configuration, that kind of stuff. And, uh, so we set that out as sort of like a, a little, I mean, that's kind of an ambitious goal.

And honestly, we at furion are not relational database experts, right? We, we do, we, we love our web assembly and we love our low level programming, but database is, uh, is a different thing. So we started looking around to see what other people were doing, and we, uh, we ended up, uh, chatting with the folks at turso.

I think they, they used to be called Chisel Strike. Mm-hmm. Uh, they were founders of cdb.

And cdb, of course is this database as you, as you probably remember, that was designed for like massive amounts of data, right? Petabytes of data. And, uh, and, and you know, that, that was years ago.

Now the founders are at again, but this time they're like, how do we do small but distributed cloud native databases, you know, the kind that developers are gonna use the kind that will host your average content management system, your average web backend, your average microservice, not so much like the data warehouses in the banks, but the kinds of things that we as developers build fairly frequently. And, uh, and so we, we partnered with, Lemme help, let me stop you right there. Yeah, sure.

Seal a database like the Cilla db, uh Yep. Company also is using it. So these are the folks who originally kind of did that, have now started a second Yeah.

Thing, chisel strike and it's got the new name. Okay. Yeah.

And they're, and they're going for kind of like the small profile instead of, so in some ways, like the pendulum swung to the Get opposite side. It, I mean, it, you know, it speaks to the, to the solution that it was able, you know, on one hand to do that massive scaling and on the other hand, be a good, a good choice for, you know, more boutiquey kind of stuff like that. Yeah.

Talk to me about NoOps database, though. I, look, I'm the database expert either, but we have relational, we have sql, we have no, no sql, what is what when we talk NoOps database, what do you really mean, Matt? Yeah.

And, and this is a, a SQL database rights. It is in that same family, sql, SQL databases, it's, yeah. But the, the idea is, um, so, so the ops part is like the, the configuring standing up doing permissions, you know, typ typically you would think of, you know, Postgres, Oracle, SQL Server.

These are all standard relational databases where, uh, you, you still have somebody who's administering the database, and the permissions model is very sophisticated. And when it gets to the developer, right? The developer is given sort of like, here's your connection string and your credentials and, and you know, here we're gonna configure your security groups.

And so there's all of this stuff that the, all of these sort of knobs and dials around the database that are tuneable and that are the expectation is that you will, you have to tune some of them, right? Right. You have to set up the permissions, you have to set up the user accounts, you have to set up the connection strings.

Those are things that the developer really doesn't want to do in the development cycle. And in fact, the kinds of things that a whole bunch of applications that, that the, they, they never really need, right? Databases like Oracle and like SQL Server are built for a, a class of computing, a class of data storage that most developers really only need for very specialized applications.

Um, and so no ops databases are those that really kind of remove the, the visibility of all of those bells and whistles, right? And, and on one end, uh, you know, some of that stuff can now be just completely automated, right? We, we know enough of it.

And particularly in an environment like ferion Cloud, we know so much about what the target environment and the shape of the application are that we can auto configure all of that. And there's no need for anybody to go in and have to write the connection string from the, from the application to the, to the database. It, we know where the database is, we know when the application needs access to it.

So the host should be able to do all of that work for them. And on the other, there's just stuff that users probably don't ever really need to do. That's all tuneable.

In big databases, for example, these days in a, in a microservice style application, there's no reason why a developer should have to configure permissions. There's just a service account that gets created to run in the cloud, and all the permissions are just sort of auto granted to it. So we wanted to take all of those things that were frustrating, little bits and pieces of configuration that, you know, the SQL servers, Oracles, and Postgres of the world were requiring developers to do, just take 'em off the table and say, we'll automatically manage that.

And so you don't have to do any operations. So that's the kind of no ops kind of thing for us. Got it.

Now, allow me to be devil's advocate for a little bit, Matt, my experience with NoSQL, uh, and some of the newer databases, when in many of the cases also meant no, or little security. So in a no ops database here, tell me, tell me that's not the case, right? Security is as good or better.

That's what I wanna hear, Matt. It's the opposite. It is, it is better because here's, so let's think about, just like some of the things that have been problematic is the, uh, is the connection encrypted end to end, right?

Are the, are the credentials secure? Are they rotated regularly in the past? Basically, those are the things that people have done.

Not day one, not day two, but like day 317 or something like that. Um, but the, the kind of nice thing about the no ops model is we know we can kind of encode those best practices directly into the platform. And, and so say, let's talk about rotating credentials, right?

We all hate changing our, our usernames and password particularly because it logs us out of everything, and we have to log back in and then remember the new password when, when the username and password never even make their way to the user's, uh, to the user's view, right? It's, it's injected into the host runtime, the web assembly runtime, and managed on the substrate. So the, the runtime knows it, the database knows it, it's managed under the hood.

The user doesn't even have access to the username and password because they don't need it, because they've already logged into the system. The credentials have been. And, and so we're basically proxying those through because of that.

There's no way for the credentials to leak back out through like an environment variable thing or a misconfiguration of something, or, you know, somebody has a copy of the password on their local system and accidentally attaches it to an email. All the, all the things we all have probably, I now, I, I think I might've just outed myself as something embarrassing I've done at one point in my career, but all the kinds of things that we worry about doing, right? And No, no one's watching.

Don't worry. Yeah. Yeah.

Oh, yeah, yeah. Um, and, uh, you know, those are the kinds of things that we can just kind of eliminate from the equation, right? And, and, uh, that's kind of, that's one of the sort of hidden superpowers of this kind of no ops model, is that if the team that implements the no ops model knows what they're doing, and then, you know, the ion's got a fantastic group of platform engineers.

They just baked all the security and from, uh, from day one. And by the time I started asking the questions, Hey, what about this? They're like, don't worry, Matt already covered, already done, you know, this is gonna be highly secure.

And that's really exciting because that means developers, again, it's one less thing the developer has to worry about is, oh my gosh, do I need to rotate credentials? Oh, what about my T L SS certificates? Do I have to go over through that arduous process of re re um, generating and deploying those?

And the answer to all these things, it's just no, the, the NoOps platform itself doesn't. And I think that because the security can be done this way, I think this kind of no ops movement is gonna gain some steam, not just in firm on cloud, but across the industry, because the ability to automate and auto deploy security without inconveniencing humans on one side, and also sort of implicating 'em on the other side, that can be a really powerful thing for us. Love it.

All right. Let, let's get back on track here. I wanna deliver it to our audience.

So Ferion is offering this no ops database, uh, for, uh, server building serverless apps with web assembly as of today. Yep. Yep.

com. Right now we're in, uh, what we call private beta, which basically means you just ask us to turn it on on your furion Cloud account. And we do, we're, we're well on our way toward the public beta where this will just be automatically enabled for every user and furion Cloud Cloud.

Uh, but it's, uh, it's, it's super easy to just go in there and say, Hey, I've got my, here's my furion cloud account. Can you turn on database access? And you'll get, you know, the, the first database is, is on our free tier, totally free.

And then after that, uh, you know, as we roll out the public preview, we'll, we'll start allowing people to purchase additional databases so that you can have, uh, as as many as you need. That's a great thing. Just, I mean, it's that simple.

Yep, yep, yep. All right. No catches, no nothing.

It's all there. And the, you know, it, it's the ni the whole workflow, this is just so nice, right? Because the developer just says, Hey, turn on some database for me.

Oh, I've got some database. I'm gonna gonna work with it. I'm gonna write my SQL and I'm gonna deploy it.

And, and things are just there and they're just functioning. And there's really, uh, it's stress free. Uh, and to me, you know, I, there are these moments, right?

I've been doing software development for years and, uh, you know, there are these moments where you're, you're so used to grinding through something that you've always done, and you try something and you have that moment where you're like, wait, what? I don't need to do this. It's just there.

And you get a little suspicious and you're like, yeah, but is it, is it really doing what I, what I think it's doing? And you try a couple of things, and it is, you know, you have those moments and you're, and, and they're, they, they kind of feel like little mini magical moments, right? Where you're like, oh, a thing I used to have to spend four hours to do is now automatically done for me.

And that's the kind of experience we've been shooting for with these no ops experience, uh, with these no ops services is just, you turn it on and it's there and it feels like magic, right? It feels like, uh, a weight lifted off your shoulders. 'cause it's a thing you just don't have to do or, or think about anymore.

Uh, and so, you know, and as we get into that public preview mode where it's just automatically on for everybody, it even gets so much, so much more so that it's just like when you need it, it's there. And, and it's merely to you to, you know, take advantage of it and, and do what you need to do with it, uh, without having to string together different services, manage those connection credentials and that kind of thing. I love it.

Very cool. Um, Matt, we're about outta time. com.

Yep. Dot com. Go check it out.

Hey, you are going to London. Yep. Right?

But most of the team will be in Bellevue, it sounds like. Yep. Yep.

But either way, if you're in the London area or you're on the West Coast, check out Fer Island and the rest of what's going on around the world of web assembly and m And if you can't make either of those, join us in Chicago for CubeCon Cloud Native Con where we'll be there streaming live. Matt and the Fermion team will be there. And if you couldn't make that, check it out, Matt.

He'll, I'm sure we'll be streaming with Matt on text drunk tv. I'm sure he, Matt, always, always a pleasure to see you, man. I'm not gonna make you sing on the way out.

I don't, I don't need the outro anyway. No, well, you did the intro. We'll let it go.

We'll put something up for the outro. Hey, man. Always a pleasure though.

Best of luck. Keep us posted. I where comes worse?

I'll see you early November. Yep. In Chicago.

Yep. Hey, great to chat. Thanks for having me on.

All right. We're gonna take a break on text Strong. We'll be back in a minute.