Why I Joined Yugabyte as a Solutions Engineer
November 21, 2022
Yugabyte Japan was established in October 2021 and has grown rapidly ever since. This is the second “Yugabyte Japan Spotlight Interview,” which focuses on Yugabeings working in Japan. A Japanese version of this blog is also available.
My background
I’ve worked as an IT engineer for over 20 years—ever since I graduated from university. I actually majored in sociology, and never dreamed I would end up working in the IT industry. However, I decided to start my career as an IT engineer at IBM Japan, as I believed there would be equal work opportunities, regardless of gender. I also wanted to build IT skills that I could utilize in the future.
I ended up spending 15 years at IBM , focusing on integrations and automation. In the summer of 2019, I was contacted by a recruiter who showed me a MuleSoft presentation and demo. I was fascinated by how much the integration solution had evolved and adapted to cloud native technologies. Although I was anxious about leaving IBM; I felt that it was time to challenge myself, and in October 2019, I joined MuleSoft Solutions as their first engineer in Japan.
My experience at MuleSoft and how I met Yugabyte
My first few months at MuleSoft were a battle as I had no manager or team to help with product introductions, demo requests, workshops, marketing content creation, or even event support. MuleSoft can be used to connect Salesforce and on-premise customer databases, giving companies a complete view of their customers. This type of legacy modernization is a common challenge for many Japanese companies, which are keen to address this issue as soon as possible. However, many didn’t know what to do with their existing IT assets or how to draw up a new, future-proof architecture.
Getting to Know Yugabyte
I first encountered Yugabyte via a LinkedIn connection. Shortly after I joined MuleSoft, I went to a kickoff in San Francisco and met a former employee. He had left the company over a year before, but he knew MuleSoft when it was an open-source project. He was well informed about technology trends in Silicon Valley and the open-source community, so I was curious about the company he had joined—Yugabyte.
As I read more on the Yugabyte Distributed SQL blog, I realized that this was a company that could provide the missing link and help Japanese enterprises to modernize their backend systems.
Why Work at Yugabyte?
YugabyteDB is an open source, cloud native distributed SQL database. It was predicated on cloud native technologies such as massive scalability and microservices. Therefore, Yugabyte’s tutorials include materials on Docker and Kubernetes, as a matter of course, as well as being installed on macOS and Linux.
It was a culture shock for me, primarily used to “born in on-prem world” software, to see multiple containers launched and clusters configured just by passing the number of replicas as an argument like “- rf 5”.
YugabyteDB runs anywhere, which is one of its strengths. For example, Google Spanner can handle geographic distribution and large-scale scalability, but it cannot run on-premise. Many companies are still hesitant to store their data in the public cloud for security and compliance reasons. For such companies, having the option to run a strongly consistent and scalable distributed SQL database on-premise or in a private cloud is a huge advantage.
I was also attracted to Yugabyte’s open-source roots, after seeing Linux and Kubernetes gradually become de facto standards and watching my former company, MuleSoft, grow from an open-source project. Developers are attracted to open-source projects, and software supported by developers becomes de facto and forms an ecosystem. For example, you can create an entire open-source solution using YugabyteDB. You can choose Prometheus to monitor the YugabyteDB load, Debezium for change data capture, Kafka for streaming, Elasticsearch and Kibana for search and visualization, and so on.
Furthermore, talent is attracted to projects that developers are interested in. Yugabyte is attracting the world’s top engineers, and is growing and evolving every day. This gives me confidence that our database has the potential to become THE de facto distributed SQL database for cloud native applications.
Boosting digital transformation with YugabyteDB
Business logic has evolved in the form of microservices and modular monoliths, which are easy to modify and maintain. Infrastructure is now virtualized, in the cloud, containerized, and flexibly scalable to provide companies with choice.
In contrast, databases, which store critical data and lay between infrastructure and logic, have changed little since RDBMS and SQL technologies were established over 40 years ago.
While non-relational and in-memory databases have emerged to support some cloud-native workloads, the databases responsible for complex SQL processing and ACID transactions in mission-critical systems remain monolithic.
YugabyteDB modernizes the database layer. I am excited to be a part of a once-every-forty-years technology revolution and looking forward to using YugabyteDB to help Japanese enterprises achieve their digital transformation goals.
Want to learn more? Yugabyte Japan delivers monthly “Yugabyte Japan Hour” the last Tuesday of every month. Our next event is on the 29th of November or you can watch all the recordings from past events.. Or check out all of our upcoming virtual events.
