Summary

Josh Howard, Senior Engineering Manager at Cloudflare, joins Kostas and Nitay to discuss Cloudflare's innovative serverless platform, Durable Objects, and Workers.

Learn how Cloudflare enables developers to build stateful applications with global scale, consistency, and simplicity at the network edge.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction and Background
02:01 Journey into Storage Systems
04:24 Cloudflare's Evolution and Developer Platform
06:29 Understanding Durable Objects
08:57 Durable Objects in Modern App Development
11:18 Use Cases for Cloudflare's Developer Platform
13:36 Building Agents and Real-Time Applications
16:19 Developer Experience and Migration Strategies
25:09 Exploring Workflow Systems: OLAP vs Applications
26:47 Cloudflare's Development Platform: Future Offerings for Data Professionals
28:42 Transitioning from Data Processing to Application Development
31:37 The Impact of LLMs on System Design
33:44 Serverless Platforms: Challenges and Limitations
40:01 Future Directions: Cloudflare's Storage Relay Service and Global Expansion

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Summary
In this episode, Erik reflects on his long and storied tech career—from the days of punch cards to founding multiple startups, including a stint at Splunk.

At 61, he offers a unique perspective on how the industry has evolved and shares candid insights into what it takes to build a successful company. He discusses the evolution from building simple tools to creating comprehensive solutions and eventually platforms, emphasizing the importance of starting with a “hammer”—a focused, simple tool—before scaling to a broader offering.

Eril introduces his concept of the “physics of business,” a framework for understanding go-to-market dynamics, pricing, and the critical role of brand in differentiating a product in a crowded market.

He also touches on the challenges of product-led growth, the importance of achieving a strong “K value” (viral or network effects), and the pitfalls of allowing short-term quarterly pressures to derail long-term vision. Toward the end, he hints at his current project, Bestimer, which aims to apply lessons from his past ventures and leverage modern AI to tackle a massive, data-intensive problem.

Chapters

00:00 Erik's Journey Through Tech History
04:06 The Philosophy of Designing for Success
09:49 Understanding the Physics of Business
14:29 Timing and Luck in Startups
18:09 Lessons Learned from Splunk
23:30 The Power of Brand in Business
28:02 Leveraging AI for Brand Development
32:04 The Resilience of Splunk
36:45 Building a Competitive Edge
37:28 From Tool to Solution
40:59 The Importance of Onboarding
44:32 Navigating Growth and Market Fit
51:11 Innovating with AI: The Next Chapter

Summary

In this episode, Gilad Kleinman, co-founder of Epsio, shares his unique journey from PHP development to low-level kernel programming and how that evolution led him to build an innovative incremental views engine.

Gilad explains that Epsio tackles a common challenge in databases: making heavy, complex queries faster and more efficient through incremental materialization. He describes how traditional materialized views fall short—often requiring full refreshes—and how Epsio seamlessly integrates with existing databases by consuming replication streams (CDC) and writing back to result tables without disrupting the core transactional system.

The conversation dives into the technical trade-offs and optimizations involved, such as handling stateful versus stateless operators (like group-by and window functions), using Rust for performance, and the challenges of ensuring consistency.

Gilad also contrasts Epsio’s approach with streaming systems like Flink, emphasizing that by maintaining tight integration with the native database, Epsio can offer immediate, up-to-date query results while minimizing disruption.

Finally, he outlines his vision for the future of incremental stream processing and materialized views as a means to reduce compute costs and enhance overall system performance.

Chapters

00:00 From PHP to Kernel Development: A Journey
07:30 Introducing Epsio: The Incremental Views Engine
10:56 The Importance of Materialized Views
15:07 Understanding Incremental Materialization
19:21 Optimizing Query Performance with Epsio
24:53 Integrating Epsio with Existing Databases
27:02 The Shift from Theory to Practice in Data Processing
29:42 Seamless Integration with Existing Databases
32:02 Understanding Epsio Incremental Processing Mechanism
34:46 Challenges and Limitations of Incremental Views
36:49 The Complexity of Implementing Operators
39:56 Trade-offs in Incremental Computation
41:21 User Interaction with Epsio
43:01 Comparing EPSIO with Streaming Systems
45:09 Architectural Guarantees of Epsio
50:33 The Future of Incremental Data Processing