Bringing Vitess to Postgres (Interview)

The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source

Sugu Sougoumarane, creator of Vitess, comes off sabbatical to bring Vitess to Postgres. We discuss what motivated Sugu to come off sabbatical, why now is the time, the technical challenges of doing so, the implementation details of Multigres (Vitess for Postgres). We also discuss the state of Postgres at scale.

Join the discussion

Changelog++ members save 6 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!

Sponsors:

• Depot – 10x faster builds? Yes please. Build faster. Waste less time. Accelerate Docker image builds, and GitHub Actions workflows. Easily integrate with your existing CI provider and dev workflows to save hours of build time.
• CodeRabbit – AI-native code reviews, built for the modern dev stack. — CodeRabbit is your always-on code reviewer—flagging hallucinations, surfacing smells, and enforcing standards, all without leaving your IDE or GitHub PRs. Trusted by top teams to ship better code, faster.
  Start free at CodeRabbit.ai
• Fly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps close to your users — global Anycast load-balancing, zero-configuration private networking, hardware isolation, and instant WireGuard VPN connections. Push-button deployments that scale to thousands of instances. Check out the speedrun to get started in minutes.

Featuring:

• Sugu Sougoumarane – GitHub, LinkedIn, X
• Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
• Jerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X

Show Notes:

• Multigres
• Vitess
• Supabase
• Neon
• PlanetScale

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Fejezetek

1. This week on The Changelog (00:00:00)

2. Sponsor: Depot (00:01:01)

https://depot.dev

3. Start the show! (00:03:19)

4. Why sabatical? (00:07:02)

5. What is Vitess? (00:10:40)

6. From side project at YouTube to full-on company (00:14:53)

7. Where is Vitess for Postgres? (00:18:35)

8. Sugu's Ah ha! moment (00:22:59)

9. Explaining Keyspace ID in Vitess (00:27:41)

10. Sponsor: CodeRabbit (00:34:29)

https://www.coderabbit.ai

11. What's different? (00:37:12)

12. Does this compromise Postgres for life? (00:41:15)

13. Porting Vitess to Multigres (00:43:11)

14. What are your marching orders? (00:49:49)

15. Are you writting this in Go? (00:51:08)

16. Building the team (00:53:07)

17. Implementing Multigres (00:54:12)

18. Multigres to Supabase (00:56:57)

19. Unburdened by past decisions (01:03:35)

20. State of Postgres at scale (01:07:32)

21. LIVE IN DENVER!! (01:13:35)

https://changelog.com/live