2017 was an exceptional year at ScyllaDB. We were successful in all the areas that really matter—our product, our staff and, most importantly, our user community. And while there’s still much work to do, I’d like to take a moment to reflect on a few of our bigger accomplishments from the year.
1. Our User Community Grew and Grew
Years from now we will remember 2017 as when our user base really started to take off. We’ve enjoyed tremendous growth for both our open source community and the number of companies paying for our enterprise product. We’re also pleased to see the variety of companies using ScyllaDB—from early-stage start-ups to some of the largest companies in the world and businesses in any number of industries. Seeing our database powering the next generation of applications makes all our hard work worthwhile. Have a look at our Users Page on our website to read what some of our more notable customers have to say about ScyllaDB.
2. We Had an Exciting Two Days at the ScyllaDB Summit
Our second-annual ScyllaDB Summit was easily a highlight of the year. There’s no better opportunity for us to spend valuable time with our users and partners. At this year’s Summit, we hosted more than 200 attendees and held 40+ highly technical sessions over the course of two days. Surveys of attendees show that the best things about the Summit were networking with ScyllaDB staff and our user community, learning about other ScyllaDB use cases, and getting an early look at our product roadmap. We received lots of favorable comments on the food and swag, too. Stay tuned for details on next year’s ScyllaDB Summit, coming soon! In the meantime, you can have a look at videos of the talks from ScyllaDB Summit 2017 here.
3. We Raised $16 Million in Series B Funding
Strong funding is key to our ability to grow our company and evolve our technology. With that in mind, we completed a $16,000,000 Series B round in March of 2017. We feel very fortunate to receive such a vote of confidence from our investors. The round was led by Western Digital Capital, Samsung Ventures, Magma Ventures, and Qualcomm Ventures, with participation from Bessemer Venture Partners. We’re using these funds to expand both our open source and enterprise products and to invest in the sales and marketing we need to continue to grow our user community.
4. We Introduced the First Autonomous NoSQL Database
Our vision has long been to provide a database that dynamically tunes itself to varying conditions while always maintaining a high level of performance and consistently low latencies. This approach makes much more sense than saddling the user with elaborate guides and explanations on how to tune for all of the changing workloads that a database must contend with. Not only does the autonomous database approach greatly reduce administrative burden, it also means that users can always push the database to its limits and it will always fully utilize available resources. We also hardened ScyllaDB and dramatically improved its resiliency. In fact, we’ve heard from several users that ScyllaDB is now not only more stable than Cassandra, but is their most stable infrastructure component overall.
Our latest release was a big step forward in achieving our goal of the autonomous database. ScyllaDB 2.0 introduced an impressive list of new features in this area, including Row Cache for wide partitions, Heat-Weighted Load Balancing, CPU Isolation and much more. We also continued to solidify ScyllaDB to deal with low memory availability and improve the exception safety aspects during out-of-memory times.
ScyllaDB developers continued to work on the master branch to achieve better wide-row eviction and later wide-row repairs, add dynamic compaction controllers in order to dynamically prioritize compaction when there is a backlog, etc. We continuously run 200-node cluster tests under varying workloads.
5. We (Almost) Closed the Feature Gap with Cassandra
This year we made significant progress in our goal of feature parity with Cassandra. Recently added features include Counters, Materialized Views, Secondary Indexes, Hinted Handoffs, User-defined Types, migration from C* 3.0 format and more. I’m happy to report that ScyllaDB now supports the full feature set of Cassandra minus the long-anticipated LWT, which will arrive in Q1. In 2018 we expect to surpass the functionality of Cassandra.
6. We Released ScyllaDB Enterprise
In 2017 we unveiled the enterprise release of ScyllaDB, with a longer lifetime, security features such as audit, role-based authentication, and granular repair. We coded encryption at rest and will soon merge it into our product. An exciting component that’s coming soon is our new management console. Developed in the Go language, the management console controls and manages remote ScyllaDB clusters. The first version is code complete and will be released in Q1 2018.
7. We Were Recognized by Leading Hardware Companies
Just as we saw the KVM ecosystem grow in our past lives, we’re now enjoying a growing ecosystem at ScyllaDB. ScyllaDB gained Power 8 CPU support, which leverages our shard-per-core design with 8 hyperthreads per core. ScyllaDB was also ported to Mainframe. In November we announced our integration with the Qualcomm Centriq 2400 ARM CPU with 48 cores per chip and > 1M OPS/server performance.
Innovation doesn’t stop at the CPU level and amazing solid state and 3D Xpoint drive technologies further push the performance envelope, delivering the performance of in-memory caches with full on-disk persistence at only half the cost. See our Intel Optane Blog Post to learn more.
8. We Acquired Powerful Database-as-a-Service Technology
We’ve been receiving more and more requests for hosted ScyllaDB on various cloud platforms, such as AWS. In response to these requests, we acquired Seastar.io technology, a hosted Apache Cassandra service. As part of the ScyllaDB enterprise product and service portfolio, core Seastar.io technology will enable developers to have a fully managed hosted ScyllaDB cluster up and running in minutes, aided by a dashboard and API that greatly simplify the provisioning process. You’ll see this powerful technology integrated into our product set in the first half of 2018. Today you can get a glimpse into DBaaS by taking a ScyllaDB Test Drive that allows you to run a full cluster, loaders, workload, and have SSH access to it with the click of a button.
9. We Grew the Worldwide ScyllaDB Team
Having added staff across geographies and in every department, ScyllaDB is now 45 employees strong and growing quickly. Our team of developers and support technicians now spans 14 countries around the globe. And we’ve been bringing in talented Sales, Marketing, Finance, HR and Administrative staff to support our continued growth. That said, we still have many open positions to fill. So if you’re interested in joining the team that’s building the next generation of efficient, scalable NoSQL systems, have a look at our careers page to see if there’s an opening for your skill set at ScyllaDB.
10. We Built Strong Industry Alliances
We’ve invested heavily in our partnerships. To support these efforts, this year we launched our ScyllaDB Certified Partner Program, which supports alliances in several key areas: Technology Integration, Training Partners, Cloud-Hosting Partners, Consulting Services, OEM Partners and Channel Partners. Our emphasis on alliances is paying off. For example, earlier this year we announced a global partnership with leading IT services and solutions company Samsung SDS. We will have many more announcements like this in the months ahead. To learn more about our Certified Partner Program, please have a look at our partnership page.
And the Best is Yet to Come
As I wrote earlier, we still have much work to do in these and many other areas. But as I look back on all that we accomplished in 2017, I see that we’ve set a solid foundation for the years ahead. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank all those who have contributed to our success so far. And I’d like to wish all our users, partners and staff a joyous holiday season, no matter where you are or how you celebrate.
We look forward to working with you in 2018 and more exciting times ahead!
Dor Laor
CEO, ScyllaDB
