Hello. I'm Sunil Kamath, Principal Director Program Management responsible
for Azure open source databases and also serve on the Azure data leadership team.
Today I'm extremely proud, and excited, and honored, at the same time to
deliver this talk on Open Source and Azure Data--now and next. I'm leading with
a heart because of how important open source is to me and recording this from
the comfort of my own house. I imagine most of you have your own personal journeys
with open source. Let me share a bit of mine. My journey with open source started
back in Toronto, Canada in the early 2000s, at IBM as a performance engineer.
I worked a lot with Linux and databases. If you recall in early 2000 while Linux
popularity was growing as a desktop operating system, it was not a great
operating system to run databases. There was a lot of work that was needed to
improve memory management, scheduler algorithms, file i/o management, etc. I
had a distinct privilege to drive several improvements and optimizations.
Look at the progress on where Linux is today. There's not an app that does not
run on Linux, and for that matter does not run efficiently at scale. Fast
forward to into Microsoft just over three years ago, I helped launch two of
the most popular open source relational databases in the industry on the Azure
platform, MySQL and Postgres. MySQL and Postgres were the most sought
after databases from our customers. We listened and delivered. Can you spot me in
this picture? Gosh, look at how close I'm sitting to my teammates in this picture.
Seems surreal. Obviously this wouldn't have happened today
for obvious reasons due to COVID-19. In the same timeframe, in May of 2017 I authored
this post of preview of Azure Postgres database service. Truly truly
exciting days. Love my work on open source databases as I'm sure you can see
it, then and now. Less than one year later, in 2018, here I am being
interviewed on Microsoft Mechanics, talking about the general availability
of open source databases on Azure. The same year we also brought Azure Database
for MariaDB to the platform. Since the availability of these services, it has
been extremely popular on Azure. A big big thank you to all those
who have made the service to what it is today. We couldn't have done this without your
support and feedback. The great apps and solutions developed using these databases
led us down the path to do more. The acquisition of Citus Data.
I was intimately involved in this acquisition of Citus Data into Microsoft.
For those that are not familiar, Citus is an open-source extension to Postgres
that transforms single node Postgres and transforms it into a horizontally
scalable distributed Postgres. Postgres itself, as you all know, is a very
popular open source relational database. I will talk more about Citus a bit
later.
This is obviously not going to be a talk about me,
my resume, my work, or my team's work. I'm here today representing all of
Azure Data and my colleagues here within Azure Data who are obsessed about their
work solving your challenges and delivering solutions on your terms. I'm
here today to talk about what our team in Azure Data is doing for the
open source community. What our Azure Data team is doing for data professionals.
What are we doing for developers.
Allow me to talk about our mission. Our mission at Azure Data, delivering the
one data platform that empowers the world to make sense of all
data anywhere at any scale. We derive our inspiration and purpose from this very
mission statement to serve you our customers and partners. This mission by
the way is not possible without open source. Open source is a very key
ingredient. Within Azure Data, we now have comprehensive open source based data
products ranging from relational databases to Hadoop, Spark etc. Literally
every product or service we use has some open source technology in it. We
contribute to open source. We integrate with open source. If you are a developer
or an architect that primarily prefers to use open source, you have
all these capabilities and this rich ecosystem seamlessly integrated within
Azure. There has never been a more empowering time to work with data.
Whether you are a data scientist, or a developer, or a manager, a marketeer, or
anyone making decisions based on data, because due to COVID-19 things are
different. I want to share a few examples of how my team at Azure Data, alongside
our partners is helping to make an impact. First example, this is a
super interesting story, and recently published. Microsoft Healthcare Bot. You
can find a URL on this slide to make it easy for you to look things
up later. This article is about how healthcare bots are being used to fight
the good fight against COVID. This healthcare bot helps to screen people
for possible coronavirus infections and treatments. Used in 23 countries and
also in European countries like Denmark, Italy, Finland. From the
beginning of March 2020 to the middle of May, this has served over 320 million
messages, helped over 31 million individuals, built on top of Azure. Specifically the
Azure Redis Cache, Azure CosmosDB, our flagship NoSQL database,
Azure Search etc. The critical sector impacted due to
COVID related stay-at-home order has been education, with many many schools
and universities across the world being shut down. I've been deeply touched
and impressed by how local governments and private institutions have stepped up
to this challenge. As an example, in Asia live lecture wasn't working, and students
were not able to access lectures. They needed to make home based learning work.
In just a few weeks, we enabled the solution that serves over 4 million
students on Azure and using the MySQL service, from inception to production.
This example is just the beginning. If this was a previous generation of data
center architecture or software architecture I don't think we would have
been able to deal with this crisis as effectively as we have been able to. We
have also been working very closely with partners to support local government
initiatives. Our Azure database services are an integral part of the solution to
respond to COVID-19 enabling emergency response services. Things like
coordinating donations of essential supplies. We also made it possible for
volunteers to register to offer their services, so that doctors, nurses,
paramedics, & IT professionals could register to help people who needed help.
Azure Database Services are also part of an effort here in Europe as governments
approved funding loans aimed at financing working capital for small
businesses, and especially those in sectors which are significantly impacted
due to COVID. One of the banks found that application requirement to scale to
2 million connections. The inherent scale available in our data services, in
this case MySQL, helped to support this increased mode with full security,
and most importantly cost-effectively. There is this working from home
thing. Which I suspect has touched many of you, especially those of us who work in
software, where the nature of our jobs allows us to do do it from home. We are
pretty lucky that way. Although I have to say, I know that working from home is a
privilege, but I also have two small kids at home, and I know firsthand it's not
that easy. My admiration and empathy for all of you out there who are doing your
best to meet everybody's demand, be it kids, family, work time, teammates under
these testing times. Another example of how things are different. At Microsoft
we've seen a huge spike in the usage of Microsoft Teams. As of mid-May we have
over 75 million daily active users, for 4 billion meeting minutes per day.
Privilege, truly a privilege, to help people around the world to enable to
work remotely in a more secure way, staying connected through video meetings,
calls, chats, etc. I spend a good part of my days in meetings conference calls,
collaborating with my team. For those who have internet bandwidth, it helps to
see people, not just to hear their voice, but to actually see their expressions,
their reactions, to stay connected. It's a privilege to be able to do what I do and
I'm hugely grateful for that. I should point out that Microsoft Teams runs on
Azure. Teams is a fully cloud native application. The fact
that Teams is able to handle this volume in these testing times, is a
testament for what Azure and cloud can provide to these critical applications.
We are building all of this, Azure's cloud infrastructure in a very sustainable way.
Now back to the heart I started this talk with. At Microsoft, we love open
source. You could say perhaps more correctly that we have grown to love
open source. My team well, we live, eat, breathe, open source--
making our open source cloud databases easy to provision, more accessible, more
secure, easy to deploy in the cloud.
Which takes me to the quote from Satya, our CEO. There's something about this
quote from Satya that I find really compelling. It drives home that Microsoft
today is not the company we were 10 years ago.
Satya says "Judge us by the actions we have taken in the recent past, our actions
today, and in the future." The fact is that companies and culture and people can
change. I feel blessed to be part of this change at Microsoft.
Today at this European Open Source Summit, I believe 3 of my teammates are going
to be giving a talk, John Gossman, Jose Miguel Parrella, and Toni Willberg, on the state
of Linux on Azure. There is so much going on with Linux and open source and
Microsoft Azure. This is just one example of our commitment to open source and
there are much much more. I mentioned the Citus Data acquisition
earlier. I was involved in that acquisition on the very beginning, getting to know
the team, the founders, and their wholehearted commitment to the Postgres
open source community. Citus is an extension to Postgres that I
talked about before. It transforms Postgres into a horizontally scalable
distributed database. Which means it's possible to do things that simply were
not possible before. Citus is open source as I just talked about, and I'm
very happy to say also available as a built-in, cloud native, fully integrated
deployment option for our Postgres database offering on Azure. It is
Postgres Hyperscale. I put a short URL on the screen to the GitHub repo for the
Citus open source project in case any of you want to try it out or learn more.
I talked about how scaling out Postgres with Citus opens the door to new
possibilities. I love this quote from our own internal user who uses Postgres
and Citus running on Azure to power an analytical dashboard. It is used by
the Windows Data and Intelligence team, captures over 20,000 different types of
metrics, from over 800 million devices, supporting hundreds of concurrent users,
over 6 million queries executed every day. It's a huge deployment, making it
possible to make shiproom decisions for Windows. I put a short URL to this blog
post that dives into much detail about this workload, the use case,
and their implementation details, in case any of you want to read and learn
more about this story. I don't want you to think we just build great
capabilities on top of open source and use open source only for our own benefit.
We believe it's super important to contribute back to open source
communities in very meaningful ways. Which leads to just a few months ago, we
welcomed three Postgres committers to our Postgres team at Microsoft.
Committers in Postgres are engineers who have made substantial contributions to
Postgres, and who lead key areas of ongoing Postgres development and
innovation. That's what Thomas Munro, Jeff Davis, and Andres Freund are
continuing to do, collaborating and partnering with developers around the
world from multitude of other companies to shape the future of Postgres.
In fact, since this blog was initially published, a new Postgres committer has
joined Microsoft. So we went ahead and photoshopped David Rowley into this
picture since obviously his work is also very important, and I didn't want to
leave him out of the story. Our open source contribution also
expands into other areas, such as Azure Data Studio as an example, which is a
multi database cross-platform tool that is very popular, supports SQL Server
and Postgres today, and plans to expand to support other databases as
well. One more example to share. This picture is from a video filmed in
Florida in November of 2019 as part of our Microsoft Ignite event.
David Schneider is the Vice President of Engineering at Systems Imagination. He
got up on the stage to demo what his company is doing with SQL database
and Big Data Clusters on Azure in their fight against cancer, in their effort to
analyze what is called synthetic lethality. SQL Server, Big Data
Clusters allow you to deploy scalable clusters of SQL Server Spark HDFS
containers running on Kubernetes. These components are running
side-by-side to enable you to read, write, process big data from either T-SQL or
Spark, allowing you to easily combine and analyze your high value
relational data with high volume big data. The team at Systems Imagination use
Spark, SQL database, Azure Data Studio, Big Data Clusters, amongst others, in
a way that was dramatically faster and less expensive than doing it on premises.
I haven't talked much about products today. Strange for me, I'm a product guy. I
do want to mention that earlier in May Microsoft Build, our annual developer
event, went online too, all digital for 48 hours with tons and tons of content for
all of you now to consume. Go to mybuild.microsoft.com and click on the
watch on demand sessions button. You can learn more about a ton of new
capabilities we announced which are all Azure Data related at this event. Of
course, some of those will be also covered as part of this Open Source
Summit. Now it's time to wrap up this keynote, and let you move on to what's
next. I hope that all of you and your families first of all stay safe and
healthy. I also hope that you can find the silver lining in this mess this
chaos that is COVID. Know that our team in Azure Data is working extremely hard to
support all of our users, customers, and partners, and we're committed to contributing
and keep giving back to open source communities wherever we can. Also
importantly know that we'd love your feedback. We have this thing called User
Voice. For most Azure services you can search and get to User
Voice page for the service. Feedback is a gift. We value it. We treasure it. We
thank you for it. Speaking of thank-yous. Big thank you to
all of the speakers who have worked tirelessly hard in order to bring all of
this useful content available to you today. Our gratitude to all the teams
participating in this event, and a huge shout out to the organizers who made all
of these things happen. Thanks to all of you for
joining us today.